As Senior State Strategy Director, Javier works with state advisors and oversees grantmaking in the Midwest and Southwest.
Javier previously served as president of SEIU Local 26 in Minnesota, a property services union that doubled its size to 8,000 members under his leadership, a role he stepped down from in 2019.
He has been a central figure in forging innovative community-labor partnerships in Minnesota and translated that experience to consulting work with national and state-based organizations and campaigns. He is passionate about building state progressive ecosystems and is thrilled to be doing that work at MVP.
His work as a storyteller has been featured on National Public Radio’s “The Moth Radio Hour,” and his recent work on police unions, written in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, has been influential nationally and noted in The New Yorker and National Public Radio’s Planet Money. He is the creator and co-host of the bipartisan podcast, Wrong About Everything, which covers Minnesota and national politics.
Javier originally moved to Minnesota in 2000 for a predoctoral teaching fellowship at Carleton College. He is ABD in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan, where he studied colonial cultures and wrote about colonial archives and the Late 19th Century Spanish Empire.