Ai-jen Poo

Director

National Domestic Workers Alliance

Ai-jen Poo is director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and codirector of the Caring Across Generations campaign. She cofounded NDWA in 2007 and was instrumental in securing New York’s historic Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010. In 2011, she worked to launch Caring Across Generations to ensure access to affordable care for the aging population and to quality jobs for the caregiving workforce. One of Time’s "100 Most Influential People in the World" in 2012 and a recent recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, Poo is author of The Age of Dignity: Preparing for the Elder Boom in a Changing America.

Racial exclusion is both urgent and important for us to address, regardless of where we sit in the economy. We've seen it in labor laws and legislation governing the social safety net: The conditions that racial exclusion imposes upon one group over time come to define more and more segments of our population. If we don't demand inclusion for everyone now, tomorrow, we'll all be dealing with the implications.

Ai-jen Poo