Previous Executive Board
We are happy to announce that HGSU now has its first Executive Board composed of nine of your fellow student workers! The Executive Board’s primary responsibility is ensuring that membership decisions are duly executed. The Executive Board also oversees the day-to-day operations of our Union by keeping us informed during General Membership Meetings, managing staff and finances, and enforcing our contract rights to ensure our Union is strong and running smoothly.
Prior to this election, six members of the Board ran uncontested, were elected by acclamation, and began performing their duties on September 8, 2020.
The results of the elections for the remaining three positions are in and Emily Wright, Melanie Rucinski, and Andrew Bergman have won. They will be joining the new Executive Board as its Trustees. Congratulations, Emily, Melanie, and Andrew! We are excited to get to organize alongside you and the rest of our Executive Board this year.
Each and every one of the new board members has been integral to our fight for a safe and just campus for student workers, and brings a distinct set of skills, expertise and organizing experience that will inform their work and build our union.
HGSU Executive Board
President: Brandon Mancilla, History
Vice President: Marisa Borreggine, Earth and Planetary Sciences
Financial Secretary: Matthew Volpe, Chemistry
Recording Secretary: Carolyn Boudreau, Virology
Sergeant at Arms: Maya Anjur-Dietrich, Applied Physics
Guide: Aparna Gopalan, Anthropology
Trustee: Emily Wright, Population Health Sciences
Trustee: Melanie Rucinski, Public Policy
Trustee: Andrew Bergman, Applied Physics
Read below to learn more about each member of HGSU-UAW Local 5118’s first Executive Board!
President: Brandon Mancilla
I joined HGSU’s campaign during my first year, because I knew that only collective action could empower student workers. I learned how to organize at Harvard from the fantastic leaders in the History department. Through our efforts, I came to see the difficulties Harvard student workers faced and then experienced them firsthand when I started working. After last fall’s strike, I took on more responsibilities and continued to organize for the ratification of our first contract across the humanities and social sciences. As a primary contact for these departments, I had the chance to meet dozens of brilliant organizers and workers across GSAS and learn about their particular grievances. When the pandemic abruptly interrupted our lives, I helped initiate HGSU’s mutual aid efforts for our campus community and our defense of international students against ICE’s threats. Given my experience with our campaign, I am honored to serve as your first President. As President, I will ensure that our executive board is prepared to enforce our contract, build our membership power, and win an improved second contract next year. At every point, I will communicate clearly and honestly to ensure that our union is a member-driven democracy. I will amplify our ongoing fight for an independent grievance procedure with no carve out, and work to center anti-racist politics in our labor organizing. Please feel free to reach out with any questions, ideas, or concerns at [email protected].
Vice President: Marisa Borreggine
Volunteering as an organizer for the Harvard Graduate Student’s Union for the entirety of my time as a graduate student has taught me countless lessons about what it means to be an advocate, ally, and community leader. My work with the Feminist Working Group, the Contract Enforcement and Education Committee, and in my capacity as Department Leader for the Departments of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Environmental Science and Engineering has been one of the most meaningful parts of my academic career, and has shaped how I see my role in academia. As Vice President of our Local, I will continue to put student workers first, boldly face the administration, and build coalitions across campus. I believe in the potential of the Union as a force for good, because I have seen firsthand how collective bargaining creates systems of justice and democracy in the academy.
Financial Secretary: Matthew Volpe
My name is Matt Volpe, and I’m incredibly excited to be our Union’s first Financial Secretary! I’ve loved being an organizer in my department, Chemistry and Chemical Biology, for the last few years, and I’m looking forward to building a solid financial foundation for the future of our local while guiding us responsibly through our federal and state regulatory environment. Another critical aspect of my job is making sure that every member understands how and why our dues money is being used, and I look forward to doing that through our monthly financial reports at General Membership Meetings (I hope to see everyone there!), digital communication campaigns (who doesn’t love infographics??), and work with the Finance and Benefits Committee. Please reach out with any questions about dues, our finances, or our benefit funds to [email protected].
Recording Secretary: Carolyn Boudreau
I am a fifth-year graduate student in virology at DMS, and I work at the Ragon Institute in Kendall Square. As a student worker, I believe that our union is at its best when it is led by and responsive to our most important concerns – we are a worker-driven movement. As a member of the executive board, my focus will be on listening to our members and supporting them in finding and advocating for solutions. I have taken an active role in building our union as a departmental organizer in my program. I have listened to and learned from the skilled organizers and bargaining committee members and am excited to build upon their foundation moving forward. As an organizer, I bring to the table experience in uniting student workers. Looking towards negotiating for our second contract, we will need to be united in order to achieve our goals, things like #nocarveout and pay parity. In the position of Recording Secretary, I will build the structures to keep our union transparent and responsive to the needs of our members. I have experience in day-to-day management and organizational leadership that will be valuable in stepping into this role. As Recording Secretary, I will be responsible for collecting, organizing, and leveraging both the facts about our union and the stories of our members to build our strategy moving forward. Our union has created positive changes for so many of our members and for the Harvard community, and our work has just begun!
Sergeant at Arms: Maya Anjur-Dietrich
My name is Maya Anjur-Dietrich, and in addition to serving as the Sergeant at Arms, I’m also one of the co-chairs of the Contract Enforcement and Education Committee. Many people have fought with incredible energy for years to get us to this point—ratifying our first contract with new rights and benefits in a time of extreme uncertainty. In recent months, I have seen the importance of everyone understanding what rights we have, how to protect those rights, and how to continue building the momentum to fight for more rights in the future. I believe that the principle tying these ideas together is simple: everyone should feel empowered by our shared strength. As well as supporting the continued growth of our union and the work done by amazing people over the last years, I will specifically focus on two aspects of empowering our members: 1) actively enforcing and protecting our contract’s rights and benefits, and 2) making sure that our union’s decisions are made with open, transparent, and understandable processes that enable everyone to get involved.
Guide: Aparna Gopalan
I’m Aparna, a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology and now membership organizer (“Guide”) on the HGSU’s Executive Board. My intersecting identities and experiences as a student-worker have together brought me to this role. As a researcher of economic inequality, I’ve studied in dismay the decline of worker power over the past fifty years. As a worker myself, I’ve felt the bite of that reality in the growing gap between my own earnings and costs of living. As a visa-holder, I’ve known first-hand the additional socioeconomic precarity stemming from hardening international borders. And as a woman of color, I’ve witnessed both everyday and egregious instances of sexism & racism in the academic workplace. All of these are difficulties, but because with a graduate worker union at Harvard we now have ways to turn all of these difficulties into opportunities: opportunities for finding community, building trust, and organizing to build student-worker power. That’s what the HGSU has been for me and I hope that’s what we can make the union be for every one of our student-worker colleagues.
Trustee: Emily Wright
I am a research and teaching assistant at the Harvard School of Public Health. I have worked to represent and advocate for student needs in my department for the past two years and am excited to continue and build on this work as a Trustee on the Executive Board. I hope to build trust and engagement among student workers, eliminate teaching fellow pay inequities in our next contract, and strengthen the health equity perspective informing our union’s organizing—for our contract and for social justice more broadly.
Trustee: Melanie Rucinski
I am a third-year PhD student in Public Policy and a 2015 graduate of Harvard College. I have been involved in union organizing since my first year in the PhD, including as a staff organizer the summer after my first year. In my many years as a student at Harvard, I have grown increasingly frustrated with the university’s lack of support for its students and student workers. Especially since the start of COVID, it is clear that student workers will not receive the financial and emotional support they need, as well as basic health care and labor protections, without sustained organizing on the part of our union. I will serve on the executive board to aid in enforcement of our first contract and build our organizing power as we enter our next contract fight for these crucial protections.
Trustee: Andrew Bergman
I’m a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate in Applied Physics. As a Trustee, I’ll focus on creating an inclusive and participatory space by making union operations and information accessible to our membership and enabling engagement in decision-making, so that we can build power together. HGSU’s Trustees will conduct financial audits and review governance and decision-making processes. I’m committed to doing the work of building accountability and trust in our union by facilitating communication and membership participation. By directly engaging members, we can also build strength for our upcoming contract campaign.
