Analilia Mejia is the Co-Executive Director at the Center for Popular Democracy.
She is a seasoned political strategist and Afro-Latina grassroots organizer focused
on helping Black and Latinx working families who previously served as the Deputy
Director of the Women’s Bureau at the Department of Labor under the Biden
Administration. The Women’s Bureau is focused on policies and programs
supporting women in the labor force. A daughter of immigrants, Analilia has
dedicated her career to working toward a multiracial democracy and giving power
to communities that have been historically excluded.
Analilia previously worked as the national political director for the Bernie Sanders’
2020 presidential campaign, helping to boost the campaign’s ground game and
showing in key primary states through her oversight of a team of people leading
individual state outreach and engagement campaigns. Following the end of the
Sanders’ campaign, she joined the Biden Administration’s transition team focusing
on connecting activism to governance. From 2014 to 2019, she was the state
director of the New Jersey Working Families Alliance, a state affiliate of the Working
Families Party. During her tenure as Executive Director, Mejia led the organization
to win significant victories establishing a state $15 minimum wage, comprehensive
voting rights reform and securing earned sick days for hundreds of thousands of
residents in Newark, Jersey City, and 11 other cities and towns before winning a
statewide policy in 2019. In 2015, the Obama Administration honored Analilia as a
“Champion for Change" in recognition for all her efforts in support of working
families in New Jersey.
Prior to joining Working Families, she spent about 10 years working with several
unions, including as the assistant political director of SEIU Local 32BJ and the
politics and programs director for the Property Services Division of SEIU
international. She also served as the assistant political director for the Chicago
Midwest Regional Joint Board of UNITE HERE! As the daughter of a Colombian
garment worker and a Dominican laborer, Analilia is deeply attuned to the needs of
immigrant and working-poor communities and has dedicated her career to
ensuring that other families can thrive in the ways that hers did once her mother
became a member of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, which
today is part of UNITE HERE.
Analilia holds an undergraduate degree in comparative literature and two master’s
degrees from Rutgers University, one in public policy from the Edward J. Bloustein
School of Planning and Public Policy and the other in labor education from the
School of Management and Labor Relations (SMLR)