Mission

AMOR is an alliance of community based grassroots organizations mobilizing at the intersections of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and immigration status to prevent, to respond to, and to end state violence against our community. We work to create a space where the community can demand accountability, challenge injustices, and access healing after experiencing violence. We are organizing to place sovereignty back into the hands of communities directly affected by systemic oppression and to build leadership, generate power, create sustainability and organize resistance with and alongside all directly affected peoples.

Partner Organizations

Organizations involved include Direct Action for Rights and Equality (DARE), Providence Youth Student Movement (PrYSM), The FANG Collective, Colectivo Sin Fronteras, and Ocean State Advocacy. We will need support from individuals and organizations together to keep our communities safe.

Vision

AMOR envisions a world where the community has the power to ensure sovereignty. Where families do not fear being separated due to their documentation status and where black and brown communities are able to protect themselves against police violence and immigration raids. AMOR envisions a world where mental and physical health are the number one measure of community safety. Furthermore we envision a society where individual acts of hate and state sponsored hate are defeated by frontline community resistance.

AMOR Staff

Catarina Lorenzo is the Director of the Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance (AMOR). Catarina is a Q’anjob’al-Maya woman from a small village in the mountains of Guatemala. She was the first person in her family, and one of the first from her village, to graduate university. In Guatemala Catarina worked for a number of human rights, women’s rights, indigenous rights, and social justice organizations. Since moving to Rhode Island she has worked as a community organizer and in June 2017 she began work as the director of AMOR. Catarina is also actively engaged in the large transnational community of Guatemalan migrants from her home region, producing and hosting a weekly radio program called ‘Rights in Action’ which airs online and via FM in Guatemala.

Nadia Gonzales, (she/her), Base Building and Policy Organizer with AMOR. Nadia joined AMOR as a member of the leadership committee and took on her role as Base Building and Policy Organizer at the beginning of 2022. From a young age Nadia has been interested in social work, and has been motivated to support folks who have been displaced or who experience discrimination. Born and raised in Peru Nadia attended la Universidad Federico Villarreal, in the department of Psychology and Social Work and then transferred to la Universidad Garcilazo de la Vega, until 2016 when she decided to immigrate to the United States. Nadia is an enthusiastic organizer, ready to learn and highly passionate about doing good in the community. Nadia is a dedicated mother of two incredible teenagers who she describes as the loves of her life. She is also a major support for her family still remaining in Peru.

Jasmina De Leon Gill, Case Manager, is a non-binary, Latinx, queer community member in Providence, RI. They started working with AMOR in March 2020 as the case manager. Since working with AMOR, they have also begun organizing direct action in PVD within the AMOR Network. They have seen the stress and struggles movement work can create and have witnessed the marginalization of communities significantly affected by police / state violence, racism, made even more visible by the lack of resources to meet basic needs. As a case manager in RI, their goals are to create accessible resources while building a stronger relationship with this community.

Sophia Wright, Communications Manager, (they/them, she/hers) is a person of Black, Indigenous (of so-called MA & RI), and white ancestry, born and raised in Rhode Island. In 2013 Sophia graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in American Studies. Through their studies they developed the strong conviction that all radical work must happen in community with others. Since then they have engaged in community spaces in Providence doing organizing around various social justice issues including immigration, prisons and policing. Their passion for this work is fueled by their desire to see their BIPOC community thrive in public spaces and able to stand in its own power. As a member of the team of AMOR founders Sophia hopes to continue to shape the future of the organization, to learn and build healthy and sustainable community organizing practices.

Elise McCaffrey, Immigration Staff Attorney (she/her). Elise is an immigration attorney from Newport, Rhode Island, whose career has taken her to Arizona, California, México, New York and now, Rhode Island, where she is the staff attorney at AMOR and The Immigrant Coalition of RI. Elise’s experience includes representing detained persons, deportees, and those in the U.S. seeking to gain legal status and U.S. citizenship, before the Immigration Court and the Board of Immigration Appeals, USCIS, and federal petitions for review in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Elise graduated from the City University of New York (CUNY) where she was part of the Immigrant and Refugee Rights Clinic, the Law Review, and the Economic Justice Project, representing other CUNY students denied public benefits. During law school, she interned with the Southern Poverty Law Center Immigrant Justice Project in Atlanta, the Bronx Defenders and Brooklyn Defenders. Elise has focused strongly on partnering with community orgs, including Families for Freedom, Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice and the Community Legal Resource Network (all in NY). She has also volunteered with the Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative (SIFI) as a volunteer lawyer, and worked with detained unaccompanied minors at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project in Arizona, asylum seekers and migrant workers in México prior to law school. Elise is licensed to practice law in New York State and speaks Spanish and French. Two of her guiding principles are “the only way out is through” and “the master’s tools will not dismantle the master’s house.”