I am Griselda Tomaino, LICSW and have been a proud member of Local 509 for the past five years through my role as a Bilingual Outpatient Therapist at North Suffolk Community Services (NSCS). Our state and country are at a critical political tipping point that has called me to step into a leadership position as our next Treasurer at 509, in which I hope to build on President Dave Foley’s vision for a stronger and more member-led union. I believe that, like the President, the Treasurer’s position is not meant to be a career appointment, but rather a role where our diverse membership can step up and shape our union’s future. 

Being raised in Utica, a postindustrial city in Central NY, I am the daughter of an Italian-American dad and Mexican mom. On my dad’s side, I grew up hearing stories about my grandpa’s butcher shop S. Tomaino & Sons and my grandma’s work as a high school Biology teacher. I also heard about my dad’s grueling history working minimum wage jobs in slaughter houses, oil fields, toll booths, and a chicken farm, just to name a few. On my mom’s side, the stories of my tio Arturo organizing his high school in Mexico City and my tia Laura’s photojournalism work about migrant workers in the US deeply inspired me. I also fondly remember seeing my mom, a respiratory therapist, getting dressed every morning in her scrubs to go to a hospital where she sadly faced discrimination for the way she looked and spoke. Had it not been for the support from the CWA and UFCW unions, she would not have had the workplace protections to live out a full career. 

These stories and experiences, along with witnessing the hardships of downward mobility, working class struggles, intergenerational trauma, and mental illness, are what drove me to pursue my own mixture of manual labor, community organizing and social work. I have worked many minimum wage jobs in babysitting, food service, landscaping, and driving. As a Rotary foreign exchange student in Minas Gerais, Brazil, I co-created a free ESOL program for local children who could not afford the tuition. After graduating from Boston University, I walked into the Brazilian Worker Center seeking Portuguese classes and instead embarked on a years-long journey where I worked as a volunteer organizer supporting the Driver’s License for All and Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights campaigns, a worker’s rights intake coordinator, simultaneous interpreter, ESOL for social justice teacher, and then eventually served as the Vice President of the Board of Directors. It was during this time that I also became a mentor to an 11-year-old Eritrean girl whom I mentored for seven years. Meeting with workers one-on-one and hearing their stories, along with mentoring, inspired me to become a therapist in a community mental health setting. 

I fell in love with the immigrant population in Chelsea, Massachusetts while completing my graduate school field placement through Smith College School for Social Work and decided I wanted to hone my skills as a bilingual clinician in that community. I moved to Mexico City to be close to family and completed a post graduate diploma at Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico while working part-time for the Latinx Therapists Action Network, of which I am still a member. When I take on a new opportunity, I do it wholeheartedly and resource myself to do that job to the best of my ability. I’m proud of having served countless individuals and families in Chelsea and East Boston and am so excited about the possibility of being our next Treasurer to support the hardworking individuals of Local 509 who work tirelessly to serve vulnerable populations across Massachusetts!