Señeres
BEACON — For CSEA Southern Region Director Charisse Señeres, mentors from a Villanova University on-campus social justice group helped her discover a passion for advocacy, a passion she turned into a career.
“Making friends in that group is where I found my line to the union,” said Señeres.
Her experiences as a child helped put her on this path. Señeres was just a toddler when she, her mother and siblings immigrated to the United States from the Philippines. Her father had established residency the year before. The family first settled in New Rochelle, moving six years later to Salem, N.H.
“When we went to school in New Rochelle, it was such a diverse community,” said Señeres. “Everybody was from a different nationality and ethnicity in our school. When we went to New Hampshire in 1986, it felt like me and my cousins were the only people of color in the whole town. Now, there is a huge Filipino community there.”
That experience drew her to the Villanova campus group Students Against Racism, where Señeres helped support different community initiatives. In one, she helped host members of a group marching from Washington, D.C. to the United Nations in New York City to advocate for the poor and homeless.
“To see that people have made a career of supporting movements like this made me realize this is something I could really do,” Señeres said. “That’s where I got the bug of fighting for basic human rights.”
Thanks to a mentor from that group, Señeres joined the labor movement post-college. Her career path began with helping organizing home health care workers, where she learned how unions could help the mostly immigrant workforce providing home care.
After working for another AFSCME affiliate union, she joined CSEA, serving as a deputy director of organizing before taking her current position.
Activism growing
Taking into account her own experiences and seeing the recent uptick in hate crimes against members of the Asian-American Pacific Islander community, Señeres said she sees activism growing.
“In the last year, given the pandemic and the social injustice and unrest, my biggest hope is that activism is seen, especially to the younger generation, as a viable career,” Señeres said. “There are opportunities for more people from Asian communities to be involved in higher positions of the unions. I’m the first woman of color in my position. It speaks volumes that CSEA is intentionally planning for the future and ensuring the union looks more like the membership.”
Education and community are both keys to that growth. When she first joined the labor movement, Señeres was active with the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, an AFL-CIO constituency group and hopes to become involved again.
“It was a great experience seeing lots of Asian sisters and brothers in the same space,” Señeres said.
All of these experiences have better equipped Señeres for a career with CSEA.
“Having been born in another country and coming to this country, specifically to a diverse area in New York and transferring to a non-diverse area like New Hampshire, but still finding more roots there too, has given me the experience to be relatable in many different communities and with the diverse membership we represent in our union,” Señeres said.
— Jessica Ladlee
