Mattie Weiss is a long-time youth movement organizer, writer, and leader. She is a 2001 graduate of Swarthmore College, where she studied political science and organized students and staff around issues of global economic justice, local race politics, and a campus-based living wage campaign. While in college, Mattie was also a community muralist and a union organizer in Minneapolis and worked for the Active Element Foundation in New York, doing research for the Future 500 national youth organizing directory.
After graduation, Mattie was a writer and researcher for the Applied Research Center in Oakland, Calif., a racial justice "think and do tank," where she wrote and published Youth Rising, a major report on youth organizing around the country. She also wrote two chapters of the book, How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office, which she toured around the country, organizing and speaking on behalf of the League of Pissed Off Voters in the 2004 presidential election. Most recently Mattie worked in Salvador, Brazil, with a public health study abroad program. She has also lived in Nicaragua, Bolivia, and South Africa.