Bios

Chairwoman Tara Yang: 

Tara Yang serves as the Chairwoman of the Green Bay Equal Rights Commission (she/her/hers). Yang was born and raised in Green Bay and attended the University of Wisconsin Madison and received her Bachelor of Science in 2013. She is an advocate for the Asian and Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) community in Northeast Wisconsin. Her local and county civic engagement involves all aspects of basic human rights, social determinants of health, and economic development. She was instrumental in the county wide initiative to declare racism as a public health crisis and serves as a member on the first-ever Brown County Racial Equity Ad Hoc Committee. She also occupies spaces that have under-represented groups such as women of color and young professionals. She serves as Vice Chair for the Green Bay Economic Development Authority Committee, Co-Chair for the Greater Green Bay Chamber of Commerce's (GBCC) DEI Taskforce Small Business Working group, co-founder of NEW APIDA Professionals, and a diversity advisor for the Green Bay Press Gazette. In early 2022, she founded the Asian American Resource Center supported by Mayor Genrich and his Chief of Staff, Amaad Rivera-Wagner.

Yang's family owns a 16-year-old specialty Asian grocery store located in the heart of downtown Green Bay. Tara is a two-time award winner of the Young Professional of the Year Award from the Hmong Wisconsin Chamber of Commerce (HWCC) and GBCC. Her family was recognized by Madison365 as part of Wisconsin's 2021 Top 34 Most Influential Asian Americans, and they previously won the 2020 Business of the Year Award from HWCC.

Vice Chair Jon Shelton

Jon Shelton is associate professor and Chair of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He has been elected to four terms as Vice President of Higher Education for the American Federation of Teachers-Wisconsin. He also serves on the executive board of the Green Bay immigrant and refugee advocacy organization, Community Service Agency Inc. (COMSA), as well as the Board of Directors for the Wisconsin Labor History Society. In 2021, he was appointed by Mayor Eric Genrich to the Equal Rights Commission. 

Shelton is also the author of Teacher Strike! Public Education and the Making of a New American Political Order, which was the winner of the Labor and Working-Class History Association’s Herbert Gutman Prize for Best Dissertation in 2014 and the International Standing Conference of the History of Education’s First Book Award in 2018. His new book, The Education Myth: How Human Capital Trumped Social Democracy, was funded by a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Academy of Education and will be published in 2023 by Cornell University Press. Shelton is a frequent guest on Wisconsin Public Radio to talk about labor issues, and has also published work in the Washington Post, Dissent, Jacobin, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and other publications.