Ariel Koren

Executive Director; Co-Founder

Ariel is an organizer and multilingual person committed to the language community’s responsibility to act in solidarity with communities at the frontlines of the struggle against border imperialism and carceral state violence. She was motivated to co-found Respond Crisis Translation after years working as an interpreter, witnessing the ubiquitous language rights abuses across systems and especially in detention centers that play a central role in perpetuating abuse against speakers of non-English and marginalized languages. Her commitment to deepening her practice as a trauma-informed abolitionist language practitioner was also informed by the experience witnessing her Deaf sister and other loved ones being denied communication access while incarcerated. Prior to her full-time work at Respond Crisis Translation, she worked at Google as part of the Google Translate and Google for Education teams and was ousted from the company after organizing efforts to end Google's Project Nimbus contract, a billion dollar military contract between Google, Amazon, and the israeli military.