Today we’d like to introduce you to Kelsey Gray.
Hi Kelsey, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I moved to Columbus in the summer of 2021 from Denver, Colorado, and started teaching that August at Independence High School in Columbus City Schools. Before becoming a classroom educator, I worked in the education nonprofit world, where I led the organizing effort to form a union with my coworkers. Prior to that, I filed three unfair labor practice charges with the NLRB against my then-employer, Kimbal Musk (Elon’s brother), and won on every count. By the time I got to Columbus, I was excited and relieved to finally have a union job. I jumped headfirst into the work and quickly took on a visible organizing role leading up to and during our 2022 teachers’ strike.
After the strike, I was elected Chair of our union’s Member Action Team (by acclamation, because no one else wanted to continue the organizing work). Over the next two years, I re-built an internal organizing team and began working closely alongside Izetta Thomas of the Columbus Education Justice Coalition. Izetta taught me essential history about our union and our city, and she showed me what’s possible when a union genuinely aligns with the people we serve: students, families, and our broader community.
In March of this year, I founded Central Ohio Rank and File Educators (CORE), a new caucus made up of educators from multiple unions across the region. CORE is open to any school worker with a union, regardless of their parent union affiliation. We’re taking direct action together, across our unions, to fight for the schools our communities deserve. Our most powerful tool is the one that has always won change: withholding our labor.
This work is built from lessons learned the hard way. Emails to legislators haven’t worked. Rallies fall on deaf ears. Donations to political campaigns have produced little more than disappointment. While many labor leaders are spinning their wheels, we’re organizing in the streets with our own podcast, our own literature, and our own strategy. We’re down to roll with anyone who’s ready to fight for:
Collective bargaining rights
Academic freedom
Justice and protection for workers, students, families, and communities
Fair and full public school funding, now
An end to unfunded state mandates
We believe that unions are only as strong as their members, and we need more than advocacy. We need to organize. We’re activating workers to build unions that win better pay, defend our rights, stop privatization, and push back hard against the attacks coming from the statehouse. Because an attack on public services is an attack on the people, and we won’t let it stand.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Nope! All roads to liberation are rocky, but we’re building a vehicle that can keep moving forward. We’ve struggled to get leadership in various unions to support us and have experienced different levels of hostility from state affiliates. Still, we’ve organized around and beyond those institutions, and we’ve built real power. The new wave of the labor movement can be uncomfortable, even threatening, for those clinging to outdated models of respectability or control. But we’re not here to wait for permission. We’re here to win.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I started a podcast, Inside CEA, that shares real stories from inside our schools and inside our unions. I also created The Member Action Tea, a labor-focused newsletter that’s now being shared across union locals and sectors. It’s a real team effort: we have an editor, deadlines, featured art, and contributions from organizers across the caucus and the movement. To my knowledge, no one else is doing this kind of storytelling work in Ohio, and I’m proud not just of the content, I’m most proud of the people I’m alongside in this fight. These projects pushed me to become the kind of leader I want to be: one who shares power, trusts others to lead, and builds space for everyone to have real ownership over the vision, the work, and the wins.
Networking and finding a mentor can have such a positive impact on one’s life and career. Any advice?
I don’t try to figure things out on my own, and I never pretend to know what I don’t. I go straight to people who’ve done this work before or built something like what we’re building now. I ask questions like “What’s something I don’t see coming?” or “What caught you off guard when you were starting out?” because we don’t have time for gatekeeping. The political conditions we’re organizing in are getting more hostile by the day, and we need each other’s lessons to move smarter and faster. CORE is rooted in that belief. We share what we know, we build together, and we fight better when no one is hoarding knowledge.
It’s been essential for me to learn from people who’ve been in this longer than I have. Fighting for public schools, taking on oppressive systems—none of this is new. I’ve learned more from studying past and present labor movements than I ever could by guessing or going it alone. And it’s important to be honest about the fact that, in the U.S., labor unions have historically served white workers first and foremost, often at the direct expense of Black and brown communities. If we want to organize differently, we have to reckon with that history and refuse to repeat it.
When you’re organizing in this country, you have to be constantly reading, listening, and studying the ways that marginalized people (especially Black, brown, Indigenous, immigrant, and queer communities) have already built systems of survival, resistance, joy, and success. Organizing like this may feel new to some of us, especially white folks, but it’s part of a long legacy. And if you care about the work, you have to care about the people doing it, otherwise you’re just serving the same system that has put us where we are.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://core4ed.org
- Other: https://rss.com/podcasts/inside-cea/
