Dr. Butch Ware is a movement builder—an activist, educator, and organizer—respected for his moral clarity, intellectual rigor, and commitment to listening to and amplifying the voices of the people. A gifted orator and mentor, he has spent decades working alongside communities to imagine and build pathways toward justice, dignity, and collective liberation.

Driven by a lifelong desire to understand how societies transform, Butch devoted himself to studying how movements are built, how cultural change is produced, and how education can be a force for healing. As an academic historian at the University of California, Santa Barbara, his work offers a people’s history—focused on abolition, social transformation, and the role of knowledge in collective uplift.

As an activist, he has led protests, direct action, and mutual aid efforts in coalition with minoritized peoples, working-class communities, and student communities. His leadership reflects a rare integration of listening and action, with ideas grounded in history, shaped by the people most affected, and tested in struggle. His work has been marked by discipline, consistency, and a refusal to separate truth-telling from responsibility.

Dr. Ware is not a career politician. He enters politics as a voice forged in scholarship and movements, compelled by the urgency of this moment to help turn insight into action. After serving as the Green Party’s Vice-Presidential nominee in 2024, he is now running for Governor with a renewed Green politics aimed at breaking the gridlock of the two-party duopoly. As a Californian, an educator, and a father, Butch is deeply invested in the future of the state he calls home. His vision is bold and simple: to reclaim government from corporate power and secure a just and prosperous future for California.