Julie Garza-Withers is an award-winning community college Sociology instructor and organizational consultant. Her work on diversity focuses on the everyday lived experience of inequality with an emphasis on social class, ethnicity, and gender in educational and workplace settings. As an academic from the working class, Julie encourages her students to gain personal freedom through open discussions about how money and access to socio-cultural resources shapes and has shaped their self-perception and perceptions of others. Her goal is to stimulate a class consciousness in her students by offering a forum to describe and express how lifelong economic experiences influence their everyday interactions and sense of place in the world. She also works with individuals and groups to facilitate collaborative solutions to class-based conflicts.