Dolores Tejada

Director of Organizing

Dolores Tejada smiles at the camera. Dolores is a brown nonbinary person, with hair slicked back into a ponytail. They are wearing a blue button down shirt.

Dolores Tejada (they/them) is the Director of Organizing at East Bay Housing Organizations.

Dolores Tejada believes in collective liberation through organizing, action, and care. Using a Disability Justice framework to approach their work, Dolores recognizes the wholeness and capacity for everyone to have space to participate in creating a just world.

Dolores was born and raised in the Bay Area from Guatemalan (Ch’orti Mayan ancestry) immigrant parents who each had only an elementary school level education. Their parents instilled resilience, perseverance, and the invitation to question authority as foundational embodied practices. 

While in high school, Dolores began organizing for equitable education. They would go on to attend Dominican University where they majored in Political Science.

Dolores began their professional organizing career at an independent living center where they developed a youth organizing program that successfully ran campaigns for the preservation of funding for special education programs, developing and implementing a more diverse and inclusive high school curriculum that includes disability history, and increased disabled-centered access on the newly designed BART train cars. 

In 2016 Dolores ran a successful Get-Out-The-Vote campaign that increased voter turnout among people with disabilities. In 2017, they were a featured speaker at the first Oakland Women’s March. Dolores has served as the Accessibility Coordinator for the San Francisco Dyke March and as a member of the Nolose Board of Directors.

Dolores believes in the power of community action to advance equity, which is what drives them to organize. They have seen the shift in housing in the Bay Area throughout their lifetime, and it motivates them to build people power to achieve just housing for all. They identify as and hold the following identities: fat, disabled, queer, femme, and brown. Dolores uses they/them pronouns. Dolores has been with East Bay Housing Organizations since 2018. In their time at EBHO they have developed the curriculum of the Leadership Academy to focus on developing engaged and organized housing leaders, supported in GOTV and voter education work to increase voter turnout among affordable housing residents, and worked in coalitions for People’s Budget and as a part of Oakland United. Dolores aims for all EBHO members to be engaged and active participants in the policy and advocacy EBHO does.

Contact Dolores at:
dolores@ebho.org
(510) 663-3830 ext. 311