About Us

Palante Technology is a worker cooperative that provides tech consulting services to progressive nonprofit, social justice, activist and community organizations. Through this work we've developed a deep understanding of nonprofit tech needs. We have also been long involved with activism and organizing in non-technological capacities, including involvement with many of our client organizations. This breadth of experience allows Palante Tech to provide services that are tailored to meet the specialized needs of nonprofit community organizations.

Jack at the beach

Jack Aponte

is a gender/queer Black Boricua living in Oakland, CA after eleven years in Brooklyn. Jack has worked at the intersection of tech and social justice since 2003. Their roles at Palante include Backdrop and Drupal site builder and developer, project manager, and trainer on a wide range of topics from data management to digital security. Jack has been involved in activism and organizing for many years, working primarily within LGBTQ and people of color organizations and communities. They serve on the board of Aspiration, the Backdrop Project Management Committee and the Liberating Ourselves Locally (LOL) Makerspace steering committee. Jack is also a writer, leftist gadfly, casual musician and all around geek.

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Jamila Khan

is a geek in everything they do; including theater, activism, comics, puppetry, and technology. Starting with an Apple IIGS, they have worked hard at perfecting the art of taking computers apart when they don't work, and putting them back together so they do. A queer trans Muslim punk, Jamila loves that they get to use their geeky skills in support of so many wonderful organizations. Jamila is almost always online everywhere as mxroo.

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a nerd trying to look really cool with sunglasses

Jessie Lee

is a half asian trans woman who has called NYC her home for 7 years. She comes to Palante from an eclectic background of research science and art history. She has taken apart, broken, and fixed computers for fun in her spare time since childhood and has decided to turn that into a career. She is thrilled to be able to use the skills she has learned in support of organizations that she loves and that benefit her community. In her spare time she games, cooks, and is a social media monster.

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Joseph Lacey

was affectionately derided by a high school teacher as a Commodore 64 in a Pentium world. He's ridden this browbeating and countless others sitting behind help desks, administering networks, managing databases, teaching robotics and developing websites, all the while singing the praises of past and contemporary radicals to whomever would listen. Joseph's primary role with Palante Tech is CiviCRM and Drupal e-commerce implementation and development. He has a tendency to ramble incoherently as the sun sets to relinquish pent up energy from the endless hours of work.

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Kristin in clever cheetah suit.

Kristin Snelling

has spent over a decade tinkering with web projects - a visual artist from the tender age of thirteen, a front-end web nerd since eighteen, and an information science geek throughout her adulthood, she has blended and bended these disciplines to grow herself into a professional web creative. She specializes in design that focuses on organizational and movement storytelling; through both her professional and personal work, she is devoted to uplifting struggles and movements rooted and intersecting in racial, gender, disability, economic, and environmental justice; trans and queer liberation; fair labor; education; anti-capitalism and anti-imperialism. Kristin currently lives in Oakland, CA with her partner, their son, and a scrappy little dog named Mouse.

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Morgan Robinson

is from Cleveland, Ohio and has lived in Philadelphia since 2013. She works with Palante primarily on CiviCRM projects. A devoted co-op nerd, Morgan currently serves on the board of Mariposa Food Co-op in West Philly. Her background is in community development and geographic information systems; she has previously lived in Detroit, Seattle, and New York City. Morgan is a passionate leftist, particularly in the struggle for black liberation and global socialism.

Nina Reyes

is a front-end developer who works with Palante as a Drupal themer and site builder. She first fell in love with pixels in elementary school, where she was taught Logo and BASIC rather than Oregon Trail. An anthropologist by training and a technologist from the start, Nina once conducted field work in an online Harry Potter fan community that resulted in an ethnography about trust and online identity. She is currently the web director at Hyphen magazine.

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We are members of May First/People Link and the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives.

Our Name

Palante (also spelled pa'lante) is a contraction of the Spanish words "para," or "towards," and "adelante," or "forward." The word was a slogan and rallying cry of the Young Lords, a U.S.-based Puerto Rican liberation movement of the 1960s and 70s. You can find out more about the Young Lords here and here.