Steven Merrick

Steven Merrick is a successful grassroots organizer experienced in community, youth, and union organizing. His passion for civic engagement and activism started in 2012 as a student at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland where he built relationships with student leaders who were fed up with the lack of funding equality between HBCUs and other institutions of higher learning.

Since then he has gained years of thoroughly enjoyable experience organizing on the local and state levels. As a community organizer with the union 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, he worked with the Fight For $15 Coalition to raise Maryland’s minimum wage. He aided in growing their coalition and support base by connecting with community organizations, faith leaders, clergy members, and college students while focusing primarily on crafting the moral argument as to why working families deserve a living wage.

Later, serving as a youth organizer at Maryland Communities United, he aimed to pass the mantle off to the next generation of youth who shared a passion for social justice. He mentored and taught youth between the ages of 14-24 the fundamentals of community organizing and essential life skills including resume writing, job searching, and money management.

He worked with many coalitions aimed at working on education justice including The Center for Popular Democracy’s “Youth Everywhere Rising and Resisting” program, which organized and advocated to end the school-to-prison and deportation pipeline by establishing a youth mandate stating how they aimed to fund education and not incarceration, restore and strengthen the civil rights of young people in education and uplift public education, and end the private take over of schools.

Steven, his wife, and his Dalmatian Ace moved to Los Angeles California August 2021 where they found their first home in North Hollywood. You can always find them at the beach or hiking trails.