Meet Heidi

Heidi Sloan is a working-class woman.

A worker since age fifteen in her native Cedar Hill, Heidi spent years teaching children with disabilities in public schools. She learned to create spaces where kids felt safe and watched them explore, observing students hold the hands of their blind classmates and walk down the hall together just for the sake of their own curiosity and compassion.

Heidi has devoted the last six years of her life to Community First Village, where she has worked as a farmer and service provider with the formerly homeless. Organizing the residents who wanted to do farm work, Heidi led the farming program and taught residents to train new volunteers. She gets up early each day to grow produce, livestock, and community with her neighbors, sharing the bounty with the residents doing the work and reminding them just how much they are worth.

Heidi’s Organizing

After the 2016 election, Heidi saw a need for regular people to stand together, and so she joined the Democratic Socialists of America and started to learn about the power of workers. While canvassing her neighborhood about the campaign to win Paid Sick Days for workers, Heidi spoke with scores of people who were sick of going to work with the flu, and sick of being mistreated by their wealthy bosses and landlords. She learned the power of working class people taking grassroots action firsthand, mounting an 18-month campaign to move Rep. Lloyd Doggett to support Medicare For All by mobilizing hundreds of his constituents to tell him their healthcare stories.

Heidi has fought to win the largest affordable housing bond in Texas history, and to restore the Constitutional rights of people experiencing homelessness, and to block a badly written police contract. She has stood with communities fighting for justice in the Capitol and on picket lines, but she knows well the dirty tactics used by the rich to silence and suppress regular folks on the road to those victories. By working on these campaigns, Heidi has found that her passion for organizing is also a path forward – that through collective action and solidarity, we can beat big money and powerful business interests, that together we can prosper and our communities can thrive.