Lina Traslaviña Stover: From Scholar to Worker Rights Architect
When Lina Traslaviña Stover became Executive Director of the Heartland Workers Center in 2022, she didn’t just step into a leadership role; she stepped into a legacy. Her charge: to amplify the voices of immigrant, marginalized, and frontline workers across Nebraska.
Stover brings to the role the precision of a sociologist and the heart of a community organizer. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, focusing on inequality, and authored a dissertation exploring how Latino students navigate barriers in higher education.
Before joining Heartland, she held key positions at UNO and UNL, championing student success and recruitment for nontraditional and underrepresented learners. Her work bridged academia and community, always centering access and equity.
At the Heartland Workers Center, Stover oversees programs that connect civic engagement and labor justice, including Get Out the Vote efforts, bilingual leadership development, and worker-rights training. She leads with the belief that “leadership is motion”, an act of relationship-building, compassion, and collaboration in real time.
Under her direction, Heartland has expanded beyond Omaha into rural Nebraska, launching satellite organizing hubs and ensuring that the voices of meatpacking, agricultural, and service-sector workers are heard.
A published writer and commentator, Stover contributes to the Nebraska Examiner, using her sociological lens to discuss immigration, economic justice, and community leadership.
For Nebraska’s working families, Lina Traslaviña Stover is both scholar and strategist, a bridge between research and reality, policy and people. Her leadership shows what happens when intellect meets empathy and when advocacy is lived, not just spoken.
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