Allyn Maxfield-Steele has been Co-Executive Director of the Highlander Center since 2017. Raised in Texas, Germany, and North Carolina, Maxfield- Steele was born into a family of educators, farmers, secretaries, salesmen, veterans, hotel managers, social workers, and small-town Protestant church folk of the southern Piedmont and South Atlantic coast. His movement work has focused on connecting people and grassroots communities to one another through high school and college education, faith and spiritual leadership, capacitybuilding, and organizing on a range of front-lines throughout the US South, Appalachia, and globally. Maxfield-Steele is committed to figuring out how people and organizations learn and transform together, and how rural and small-town people can work together to build powerful movements.
Maxfield-Steele is ordained clergy in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina with his spouse, Erin, and their child, Ursa.
