Boston, MA - Aaron Tanaka is the founding Executive Director of the Boston Workers'Alliance (BWA), a grassroots union of under- and unemployed workers based in Boston's low income communities of color. Aaron has helped develop BWA's Worker Center, organizing campaigns and economic development projects, and supervises a 6-person staff. BWA is nationally recognized for a successful statewide campaign to ban the criminal history "box" from initial job application forms, and for its incubation of the Boston Staffing Alliance, the first non-profit temp agency in the state. BWA also runs a Green Collar Jobs Program, which includes a urban gardening project and a new biofuels worker-cooperative called Roxbury Green Power. Aaron serves on the board for the Asian American Resource Workshop and the Democracy Center, is a former Green For All fellow, and is the Governor's nominee to a Special State Commission on Job Creation. He also serves on the selection committees for the Haymarket People's Fund, an anti-racist foundation supporting over 65 groups throughout New England. Prior to BWA, Aaron interned as an environmental lobbyist in DC, and as a prison reform advocate with families of prisoners in Cambridge, MA. Aaron grew up in the San Francisco East Bay and is a '05 graduate of Harvard College.

Awards

Recipient of the Fellows Fund micro-grant award for: The Food and Land Project (Sustainability Initiative) Boston Worker’s Alliance- Boston, MA The Food and Land Project is a new initiative of the Boston Workers Alliance (BWA), a grassroots union of under- and unemployed workers of color. This project responds to the crisis of joblessness in Boston's low-income communities of color by organizing residents to develop urban farms as a strategy to generate income and to meet our own needs. The Food and Land Project includes three program areas aimed to realize aspect of a burgeoning green economy: Urban Gardening, Cooperative Business Planning, and Land Advocacy.