Giselle Armendáriz

Giselle Armendáriz alchemizes their fiery magic into various roles as a liberatory coach, cultural worker, labor organizer and program manager with experience in group facilitation, capacity building, leadership development, coaching, and policy development and implementation. Their leadership skills were cultivated through her work with UNITE HERE! Local 11, UC Irvine, and Liberty Hill Foundation and further nurtured through experience with Coaching for Healing Justice and Liberation and Liberty Hill Workers United, a union under the UAW. 

Giselle began their career as a volunteer union organizer with UNITE HERE! Local 11 in a nationwide campaign to unionize university campus food service workers. They explored their role in systems change through research and planning during their Masters in Urban and Regional Planning program at UC Irvine (UCI) . During the pandemic, Giselle’s beloved brother passed away. The country’s racial justice awakening and Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the need for collective care and the profound witnessing of grief in movement work. 

Imbued with more body wisdom and understanding of racial justice and intersectionality, Giselle moved away from academia and research and joined the Liberty Hill Foundation in 2021. They found an aligned path in Capacity Building, becoming an integral part of weaving Healing Justice and embodied leadership into programming for grassroots organizations advancing justice in Los Angeles. 

Their leadership skills expanded as part of cohort 3 in  Coaching for Healing Justice and Liberation. Learning from Damon Azali-Rojas and Sarah Jawaid, and a cohort of powerful leaders across the nation, Giselle found an answer to the questions they grappled with: it is possible, as siblings and relatives, to advance justice sustainably through embodied leadership and organizing rooted in the witnessing and cultivation of Self and Community.

Giselle’s passionate experience in labor organizing and healing justice culminated in their powerful contribution to the birth of the recently formed Liberty Hill Workers United (LHWU) Union, under the United Automobile Workers Union, where she serves as Chair for the union. 

The youngest child of Mexican immigrants, from a family impacted by the carceral state, Giselle carved their role in systems change as an empowered weaver of coaching, relational organizing, and embodied leadership.