Pilar Weiss

Pilar Weiss is the founder and Director of the Community Justice Exchange. In 2016, she launched the National Bail Fund Network, a collaborative partnership for the 50+ community bail funds working across the country to end detention in both the criminal legal and immigration systems. Pilar has worked as an organizer and strategist across the social justice movement for over twenty years. She has a wide range of experience as an advocate for systems change having worked with community-­based organizations, labor unions, and elected leaders, always with a focus on building grassroots community power.

Pilar served as an organizer, strategist, and leader in the labor movement for many years. She was the Political Director of the Culinary Workers Union in Nevada and later served as the Deputy Director of Politics & Communications for UNITE HERE, the national union of workers in the hospitality industry. In 2011, Pilar was awarded a Practitioner Fellowship at Georgetown’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor where she focused on new strategies for organizing among unemployed workers in the post-­recession economy.

Pilar has worked on a wide range of local, state, and federal election campaigns with an emphasis on creating long‐term civic engagement strategies for communities previously left out of the electoral process. She served as the Civic Engagement Director at the New Organizing Institute where she worked with community-based organizations across the country building people-­powered campaigns. From 2012-­2014, she was the Campaign Manager and Senior Advisor to Congressman Steven Horsford (NV­‐4). Pilar also worked to launch the Reflective Democracy Campaign, an initiative of the Women Donors Network that is focused on removing barriers that keep women and people of color from positions of elected leadership.

Pilar grew up in rural Northern New Mexico and holds a master’s degree in Public Health from UC Berkeley and a BA in Chemistry from the University of New Mexico.