Kristy Vance

Kristy Lee Vance was born to George and Margaret Vance in January of 1978. She is currently a single mother of two children, Hattie and James.

For 17 years, she worked at Kroger 192 in Galax, Virginia. In 2014 it was announced Kroger would be closing this store. She helped to organize the community in hopes of persuading the company to keep the store open. While the store was closed on March 23 of that year, several employees, including Kristy transferred to other stores in the area and thus for the past five years she has been working as the File Maintenance Clerk and UFCW Local 400 Union Shop Steward in the Kroger 402 store in Blacksburg, Virginia.

A Class of 2000 graduate from Virginia Tech, Kristy has a bachelor’s degree in accounting along with 32 credits toward a master’s in special education. She has also attended several organizing and political-oriented training classes courtesy of the Virginia AFL-CIO.

While on leave with her Local, Kristy has had the opportunity to serve as a lobbyist on the federal level to help persuade her senators and congressmen to vote for the Affordable Care Act; as well as a lobbyist at the state level to advocate for a higher minimum wage. She served on the 2013 Roanoke Kroger Area Contract Bargaining Committee. During the 2016 area Kroger negotiations, she helped to assemble different community groups and key figures in the area to show support for her fellow employees. In 2014, while on leave as a special representative for the Local, she developed a system to monitor and track new member signup in the Richmond/Tidewater area as well as helped with the campaign to organize the Kroger Marketplace stores in the same area. For the past five years she has been active in both the Western Virginia Labor Federation and the Western Virginia Chapter of CLUW.

In 2016 Kristy was awarded the Spirit Award by the UFCW Minority Coalition. In January 2019, she was elected to the office Recording Secretary for the Western Virginia Labor Federation and in March 2019 elected to the office of president of the Western Virginia Chapter of Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW). In 2019, she was also awarded the Woman of the Year Award at the annual Bread and Roses Dinner in Roanoke, Virginia.

Kristy prides herself in helping others, especially those who are mistreated or taken advantage of. As part of her shop-steward duties, she feels it is important to be honest and straightforward yet listen to every member’s concerns and find or provide an answer for them . It is her goal to continue advocating for workers’ rights  and to one day be a UFCW Local 400 Representative so she can have a larger impact and continue to promote all the benefits of organized labor.