Bill Chandler
Executive Director
b.chandler@yourmira.org

An eyewitness to the brutal immigration raids during the 1950’s, Bill Chandler, a California native, has been continuously involved in supporting the rights of immigrant workers for more than 45 years. He began with union organizing and community activism in the 1960s in Los Angeles.   He participated in the 1965 grape boycott effort and organized cross-border actions with Mexican and American workers to support the United Farm Workers in their efforts to improve conditions, even in the face of police harassment and brutality.

Since then, Bill’s organizing focus has been primarily with the lowest paid workers in the South, including farm workers, hospitality, health care, public and immigrant workers. Beginning in 1989 i n Mississippi, he organized the aggressive Mississippi Alliance of State Employees/Communications Workers of America. He helped start the successful effort by some 5,000 casino workers to organize into UNITE HERE in Mississippi.

Responding to attacks on immigrant workers and discrimination against Latino school children in Mississippi, Bill brought a group of immigrants, labor, civil rights, religious, social and human rights activists and organizations together to form the MIRA in November of 2000. Initially an organization of volunteers, the MIRA has grown into a major force with a staff of organizers, an attorney and advocates, led by a board made up of mainly African American and Latino leaders in Mississippi.

Bill has six successful adult children and six grandchildren. He is married to L. Patricia Ice, the MIRA Legal Project Director. They live in Jackson with two dogs and three cats.

 

Juan Carlos Cook

Organizer

j.cook@yourmira.org

After a brief absence working in the business world, Juan Carlos has recently returned to the MIRA primarily as an organizer.  Born in Jackson, the multi-talented Juan is a graduate of Brown University in Rhode Island.  In addition to English, Juan reads, writes and speaks Spanish fluently.  We are so pleased to have Juan back on the staff.

Mary K. Green

Development Coordinator

m.green@yourmira.org

Mary K. Green moved to Jackson in 2009 from Columbia, Missouri where she lived for 17 years and where she founded and was director of a progressive community elementary school for 10 years.  She has bachelors degrees in history and design.  Mary has worked in the non-profit sector  in housing, education and community arts.  Green is the MIRA grant writer and fundraiser. She also spearheads our new database technology project.  Mary is the very proud mother of a young adult daughter who attends college in New York.  She lives in Jackson with her husband, William H. Green, Ph.D., an assistant professor of religion at Tougaloo College, and their adorable dog, Pepper.

 

L. Patricia Ice
Director, MIRA Legal Project
p.ice@yourmira.org

Ms. Ice served for two years as a United States Peace Corps volunteer English teacher in Porto Novo, Benin, West Africa in the 1980s. Later, after teaching English in the Philippines, Haiti, Honduras and the United States, Ice developed an interest in immigration law.  She moved to Mississippi in 1998 to work as a reference librarian at the Mississippi College School of Law. A year later, she began an immigration law practice in Jackson, continuing with the work she had started in Michigan in 1994. Ice joined MIRA in 2001 as an attorney volunteer and then as a board member. She joined the MIRA staff in 2006 after being awarded an Equal Justice Works Katrina Legal Fellowship. Ice has been a member of the American Immigration Lawyers Association since 1993. She writes an immigration advice column which appears periodically in The Jackson Advocate and La Noticia.  She holds a B.A. in History from Spelman College, an M.A. in Linguistics with a major in Teaching English as a Foreign Language from Ohio University, and M.L.I.S. (Library Science) and J.D. (Law) degrees from Wayne State University. A native of Detroit, Ice is an attorney admitted to practice law in Michigan, Mississippi and New Mexico.

Jennifer Spann

Administrative Assistant

j.spann@yourmira.org

Jennifer, who is from Jackson, is a graduate of Belhaven College.  Jennifer assists primarily with the legal project, but helps everyone at the MIRA office as needed.

 

Kathy Sykes

Lead Organizer

k.sykes@yourmira.org

Moving from Board Member to staff in December 2011, Kathy Sykes brings highly developed organizing skills and an extensive network of relationships in the African American and labor communities to the position of Lead Organizer. Building alliances among immigrants and African Americans in the work place has been central to her work. For example, as a community organizer with the Mississippi Poultry Workers’ Center in Morton, MS, she was effective in helping to break down barriers between African American and Latino poultry workers. Sykes is a member of A. Philip Randolph Institute and currently serves as Secretary of the Jackson chapter of NAACP. She is the convener of the Mississippi Unity Caucus, a 501c4 organization which works closely with MIRA.  Her contributions have been recognized by numerous awards, including SCLC Volunteer of the Year-2003, Hinds County Human Resource Agency Directors Award-2004, James White Political Action Award Jackson Branch NAACP-2002/2007, Martin Luther King Committee NAACP Award 2007, and Firefighters Limited Appreciation 2010.