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Cheyla McCornack

Cheyla McCornack has created a body of work that represents nearly thirty years as a professional consultant, community activist, training specialist, strategic planner and speaker. She continues to demonstrate a strong commitment to ending violence against women, and social justice, working with both large mainstream systems and progressive, grassroots community organizations.

Cheyla’s extensive experience includes training advocates and professional staff of numerous non-profit agencies on: strategic planning, major donor solicitation, marketing, board and volunteer recruitment, transformational leadership development, mentoring women of color, social change and anti-oppression. She has successfully conducted community organizing activities, provided expertise regarding hiring staff, staff evaluations, long-range planning, developing core values, working with internalized oppression, creating a vision statement, developing feminist management, executive coaching and identifying emerging issues. She is often called upon to facilitate important discussions such as, Freedom: Conversations on Resisting Oppression.

Ms. McCornack has applied her excellent organizational development skills to her current focus: building leadership within immigrant/refugee communities. She assists participants in her twelve-week leadership course to develop their own potential for leadership by building leaders from the inside, out. She has created a multi-racial, multi-cultural, inter-generational, cross-cultural sustainable leadership model as her primary training and coaching focus, using progressive teaching methods such as the Theatre of the Oppressed and Appreciative Inquiry to work on internalized racism and anti-oppression.

Her current work is grounded in: the essentials of experiential learning, team building, storytelling, role-playing, collaborative and integral leadership practices, effective communication strategies, peer mentoring, inter-dependency and conscious living.

As a woman of color and an independent consultant, Cheyla applies her passion and commitment to social justice and social change to every facet of her work. Recent clients include the Asian & Pacific Islander Women & Family Safety Center and Welfare Rights Organizing Coalition, and involved large-scale, long-term projects designed to assess non-profit agencies’ needs and complete a capacity building plan. As coordinator of the Multilingual Access Project sponsored by City of Seattle’s Domestic & Sexual Violence Prevention Office through an Office on Violence Against Women Arrest Program Grant, she facilitated a year-long planning process with eleven domestic violence programs serving immigrant and refugee victims to develop a comprehensive, culturally and linguistically competent plan to better serve non-English speaking victims of domestic violence and sexual assault. Past training projects also include: Advocacy Based Counseling, a statewide training model for the Washington Coalition Against Domestic Violence and training for advocates, volunteers and Executive Director’s. Additionally, she was responsible for the following training components: Leadership Development, Team Building, Strategic Planning, Executive Coaching, and Developing Social Change Strategies. Other workshops she conducted are: How to be an Ally to the Asian/Pacific Islander Community, Re-Framing Conflict: Cross-Cultural Conflict and Resolution, and Philosophy of Legal Advocacy.

Evelyn Brom

Evelyn Brom has been a strategic planner and advocate in the field of violence against women for thirty years. For the last six years she has managed a five million dollar Federal Violence Against Women Act grant for the City of Seattle .

Ms. Brom’s extensive experience includes strategic planning, project development, and project management to shape community and government responses to violence against women, managing a multi-million dollar Federal budget, writing successful grant proposals and concept papers, and writing and monitoring contracts She recently coordinated a comprehensive domestic violence assessment, which included completion of a misdemeanor prosecution “Domestic Violence Safety and Accountability Audit,” and eight additional domestic violence assessment reports related to police investigations, firearms forfeiture in domestic violence cases, multilingual access issues, and court processes and outcomes. In 2004, Ms. Brom designed the assessment implementation plan and held a key staffing role in building the next five-year domestic violence strategic plan for the City of Seattle .

As a program manager, Evelyn was responsible for a wide range of projects including planning and implementation of a community-led project on multilingual access issues, systems implementation of firearm forfeiture and seizure policies and procedures, and a successful city workplace domestic violence training program.

Evelyn has experience working with the municipal budget process, in building budget narratives for grant proposals and in promoting fiscal policy to benefit work on violence against women. Among her achievements is planning and development work to secure resources that sustained activities begun with Federal seed monies, including community-based legal advocacy services, language advocacy services, and a domestic violence fugitive apprehension team and firearm forfeiture coordinator.

As a public servant, Ms. Brom has worked within government institutions, non-profit organizations, and in community building efforts to address gender-based violence. She has a Master’s Degree in Public Administration, and supports using critical theory in public service.

As an advocate for justice for women and children she is a strong leader. Evelyn’s early work involved grassroots organizing, and establishing advocacy programs in institutions. She has a broad understanding of the felony and misdemeanor criminal justice responses to cases of domestic and sexual violence as well as community social service system programs. She coordinated a child prostitution project team that included prosecutors, police, child protective services, youth organizations, and sexual assault agencies, producing a monograph called A Community Approach to Child Prostitution . Evelyn served as lead lobbyist for the 1979 Washington State Victims of Sexual Assault Act.

As a trainer, training coordinator, and facilitator, Ms. Brom’s experience is lengthy and varied. She has built advocacy training programs on criminal and civil legal issues, presented national workshops on felony prosecution of domestic violence and community approaches to child prostitution, and facilitated meetings from project management to community conversations. She co-designed an educational program for children who will be testifying in court, called King County Kids’ Court, which has been replicated in jurisdictions worldwide. She has also written curricula for the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission for training police officers on sexual assault.
Ms. Brom is profiled in a public administration text, Transformational Public Service: Portraits of Theory in Practice (2005).