Julie Horwin – Executive Vice President

Julie Rivera Horwin was elected Executive Vice President of the Alliance in 2022.

She is a proud representative of 400,000 NEA Retired members.

She taught in the Arizona public school system for 32 years.  Throughout her years in teaching, she retained her sense of wonder and awe of the learning process for her students. She spent her career “launching” others and continues that commitment with participants of the progressive political training institute Leading For Change as the co-founder.

Leading For Change has trained hundreds of progressive candidates, and most of the Democrats currently serving in the Arizona State Legislature are alumni of our Candidate Training, and/or our 9-month, part-time progressive leaders fellowship – most of the social justice nonprofits in Arizona have leaders and staff who are alumni of this program along with many of our policy-makers from school board members, city council, justices of the peace, state legislators and statewide office holders such as AZ Secretary of State, Supt. Of Public Instruction and many more.

In 2020, Julie founded Fair Districts, Arizona. Serving as its President, the mission of this nonprofit was to coach potential candidates through the nominating process for the Independent Redistricting Commission. The goal of Fair Districts, Arizona was to help create a fair and balanced pool of nominees committed to applying the provisions of the Independent Redistricting Commission in an honest, independent and impartial fashion and to upholding public confidence in the integrity of the redistricting process. Two of the five individuals now serving on the commission are Julie’s alumni.

Prior to being elected to the NEA Board, she served in a number of leadership positions for the NEA and the Arizona Education Association (AEA) and is currently the AEA-Retired past-president. Julie is the first NEA-Retired member of the NEA Board to lead a Think Tank for NEA.

Julie co-founded and helps run the Arizona Retirement Security Coalition. Made up of most of the active and retired labor unions in Arizona, its mission is to keep our retirement system a purely defined benefit system. We have been successful in defeating legislative attempts to change the system for 6 years in a row.

Julie worked with the Democratic National Committee to organize the members of the retired labor unions in Georgia to help re-elect Sen. Warnock in 2022. Pulling together a large coalition of unions, creating messaging that will work in 2022, helping them to develop strong communications, and providing collaborative structure, training, and grant-writing and partnering the seniors with the Young Democrats will create a strong senior GOTV effort in the 2022 midterm elections.

In March, 2022, Julie helped to organize one of the largest GPO WEP rallies in Washington, DC, with educators, firemen, policemen and other public service workers who have been unfairly impacted by these unjust laws.

Her proudest joy are her grandchildren Tanner and Piper, and their parents – her son Donald and his wife Kristin. Louis, Julie’s husband, and their extensive families make up her cherished “bubble” during this unique time in history – the Covid pandemic.