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About Affect

Affect’s mission is to catalyze social change through education, connection, and collaboration. We amplify multiply marginalized folx working in, designing for, and creating social change, with a strong focus on accessibility and intersectionality.

Team Affect

  • Elea Chang, Founder & organizer

    Elea is a community organizer and disability justice advocate. She previously worked for Upworthy and Idealist.org and is currently part of the Collins Foundation Advisory Committee and Stumptown Syndicate board president. Elea can also be found tweeting about accessibility.

  • Melissa Chavez, Content Committee & onsite coordinator

    Melissa is a digital and physical space UX designer. She also acts as a community organizer of regional tech conferences and social justice events, including PDXTech4Good, and consults on accessibility.

  • Melissa Lewis, Code of Conduct responder

    Meli is the data editor and Python programmer at The Oregonian. She’s a former data engineer and research scientist, and has been a PyLadies Portland organizer since 2014. She’s an occasional technical reviewer for O'Reilly Media and contributor to The Recompiler.

  • Nadia Gathers, Content Committee

    Nadia is the Internal Communications Manager at Github and an intersectional design thinking facilitator hailing from the d.school. In their spare time, they are a mental health advocate, occasional stage-talker, and aspiring novelist. Nadia helps people talk to each other.

  • Britton Washington, Emcee

    Britton is the founder of Portland Equity in Action, a local racial justice organization responsible for the PDX Billboard Project, an ongoing PSA campaign of more than 25 outdoor billboards in the Portland area that launched in the Spring of 2018. The campaigns aim to confront and disrupt whiteness, while highlighting racial disparities locally.