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Erin Oberson and Kelli Brennan Elected Co-Presidents of Nurses’ Union

Andy O’Brien

02 Jun, 2026

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Erin Cokie Kelli

Registered nurses Erin Oberson of Old Town andKelli Brennan of Sacowere recently elected as co-Presidents of theMaine State Nurses Association/National Nurses United. The two union leaders succeed long-time MSNA President Cokie Giles. RN Meg Sinclair was elected Vice President and Janelle Crowley was elected secretary of the union.

“Our organization has grown and I think that the most effective way to represent our members is there to be two of us,” said Oberson. “Like today I went up to Houlton to support the nurses’ strike and I was able to come back in a day, but it would have been much longer for a nurse coming from Southern Maine.”

“We want to grow our union and Erin’s been holding it down up north for so long, but with the southern part of the state getting involved there are so many opportunities down here to bring in other hospitals down south. It just seemed to make sense to kind of like divide and conquer,” said Brennan.

Oberson has worked as a registered nurse for 25 years, which she says is “like 84 in people years.” She grew up splitting her time between Portland and Rangeley. After completing nursing school, she worked at Bay State Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts. She then moved to North Carolina where she worked at Carolina's Medical Center, a major trauma center. Eventually, she moved back to Maine and started working at Eastern Maine Medical Center in 2008. She first became involved in her union about two and a half years after she started working at the hospital. The hospital announced three layoffs and her union steward and labor rep informed Oberson that she was one of them.

A few years later, she decided she wanted to become a shop steward after being targeted by a manager who didn’t like her for whatever reason. She was impressed to see how her steward defended her when she was called in for a disciplinary hearing. Since then, Oberson has been deeply involved in the Maine labor movement, serving as Vice President of the Eastern Maine Labor Council and being involved with the Maine AFL-CIO. For many years she has been involved supporting workers’ struggles, campaigns for pro-labor candidates and fighting for pro-labor legislation in Augusta and Washington. Oberson along with Nick Paquet (IBEW 1253), Jim Betts (MSEA-SEIU 1989), Tina Davidson, and Sarah Bigney McCabe were arrested while staging a sit-in at Senator Susan Collins’ office in 2017 over the Senator Collins' support for President Trump’s massive tax cuts for the rich. In 2020, Oberson, her husband Andrew Brogden (IAFF 3106) and their children were presented with the Maine AFL-CIO Working Class Hero for working tirelessly to build a stronger, broader workers’ movement and for always making union business family business.

Kelli Brennan is originally from Malden, Massachusetts, but her grandmother was from Maine and she spent summers at the family’s camp in Canton. After getting her associate’s degree at Regis University and Lawrence Memorial Hospital in Medford, she moved to Georgia and worked as a bedside nurse in a stroke unit. After a number of reorganizations and realignments and people getting fired, she ended up becoming director of the stroke program. She had never wanted to be in management, but she went on to become an interim director of the interventional radiology and neurosciences department following a billing error that resulted in the hospital having to repay $30 million in over-billing. Massive cuts needed to be made while she was leading the department. She said she finally had enough of working in Georgia when the COVID 19 pandemic hit in early 2020

https://www.nationalnursesunited.org/

https://maineaflcio.org/news/erin-oberson-and-kelli-brennan-elected-co-presidents-nurses-union