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The campaign was successful, and gave birth to rich programming and more opportunities for organizing through alliance. After college, he began working with young people in Oakland and San Francisco in the areas of workforce development, music & media, organizing and advocacy. In 2011, he became Project Director of the ‘Heal the Streets’ program (Ella Baker Center for Human Rights). He co-wrote and implemented a youth-led, participatory action research curriculum designed to examine the root causes of violence in Oakland, CA. In 2013, he became the CA Organizing Director for ‘Young Invincibles’, where he would oversee three campaigns engaging young adults in debate around Health care, Unemployment and Higher Education. Joshua is a San Francisco native, but currently resides in Los Angeles. He takes a lot of pride in his experience with the diverse communities of California. He has a vision of inspiring young people to become soldiers in the face of inequality by coaching them to love, be critical, and to never become adjusted to injustice. Joshua also works in the music industry as an A&R/ artist-manager, and believes that music is essential to understanding and uplifting our people.

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She has co-founded multiple organizations and projects dedicated to community-driven change, locally, nationally and internationally including UNEP's TUNZA Youth Advisory Council, the White Noise Collective, Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Youth Alliance, Bay Area Solidarity Action Team, the Ruckus Art Corps and PFCC. She was the Education Coordinator for Rainforest Action Network, Participatory Action Researcher with Youth In Focus and Training Coordinator for Movement Strategy Center. After working with the Paulo Freire Institute in São Paulo, she dedicated herself to making the theories and practices of Popular Education and Theatre of the Oppressed accessible to organizers, educators, researchers, and designers in the US. In addition to co-coordinating Partners for Collaborative Change, she can be found making giant puppets, gardening, or drumming. Both her Bachelors and Masters degrees are in Education for Social Justice.

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Zara is an adjunct faculty at the California Institute for Integral Studies in the BA Completion and MFA programs, teaching courses focused on anti-oppression curriculum, self and society, social ecology, media studies, integral learning, global and postcolonial studies.

She is a co-founder of the White Noise Collective, which offers dialogues, workshops, consulting and resources to collectively investigate patterns common at the intersection of whiteness and gendered oppression in order to deepen the potential of white anti-racism work.

For the last twenty-five years she has been a body-based therapist both in private practice and community health centers. She is an instructor at McKinnon Body Therapy Center.

Zara’s pedagogy is immersed in multiple intelligences, which strives to engage diverse modes of knowing, learning and expression in ways that allow everyone’s gifts to shine. As an educator, she values opportunities to connect issues within the classroom to the world outside, through deeper understanding of power dynamics, identity construction, histories of the present, unexamined assumptions, and applied projects of relevance. Her goal is to support a context of curiosity, critical thinking and compassion that supports skilled navigation and justice-oriented care for the diverse worlds we inhabit.

Zara received her Master's degree in Cultural Anthropology and Social Transformation from California Institute of Integral Studies, and has a B.A. in Religious Studies from UC Berkeley.

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A Bengali-American with heritage across the border between India and Bangladesh, Tatiana works toward reconciliation between groups at multiple ends of harm. With an eye toward 1947 Partition, displacement, fractured socio-political memory, and its renditions in the contemporary moment, she incorporates multidisciplinary tools to examine caste, communal violence, interracial/religious conflict, and meanings of self, society and culture. She conspires with political theatre collectives in her second/creative home of Kolkata, and coordinates “Beyond Partition,” a space for critical consciousness and healing for members of the South Asian diaspora.

Tatiana currently works as an RJ Coordinator within Oakland Unified School District, occasionally leading circles and theater classes in Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center. She proudly facilitates a performance-based residency at the Dublin federal women’s prison through California Shakespeare Theater. She served on the 2015-17 Program Team for Essie Justice Group, a network of advocacy and healing for women with incarcerated loved ones. She is a frequent guest instructor with ROOTS, the ethnic studies program at San Quentin through the Asian Prisoner Support Committee.

Tatiana was a collaborator with Love Balm for My SpiritChild, a testimonial theater project honoring women who have lost children to police brutality and community conflict. Previously at BAY-Peace, she trained Oakland teenagers in Theatre of the Oppressed and performance poetry, connecting storytelling to social transformation and counter-militarism. As a survivor of violent crime, she participates in victim-offender dialogues and speaks with diverse groups about accountability that moves beyond prisons, policing, and punitive discipline.

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During her many years in the South, Ellen worked as part of an incredible advocacy and organizing community on numerous efforts to close youth and women’s prisons, fight mass incarceration, and stop the school-to-prison pipeline. For several years after, Ellen directed residential camp programs where young people could learn to challenge systems of oppression while connecting with themselves, others, and the natural world.

Recently, Ellen has been working with teams of people conducting equity assessments of organizations and institutions, including the “Equity-Informed School Climate Assessment” of a school district in Connecticut. Ellen is currently an equity, diversity, inclusion and justice consultant with Partners for Collaborative Change and VISIONS, Inc. She facilitates anti-racism and anti-oppression workshops, coaching, and strategy sessions for educators, youth service professionals, environmentalists, and other non-profit and corporate staff and board members. Ellen is honored to serve on the board of the Providence Student Union, is a proud member of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ - RI), and loves spending time outside with her amazing partner and child.

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Tim spent 10 years working to transform the Sierra Club to become a force for justice and equity in the world. In that time they ran a youth leadership program for young climate justice organizers, developed plans for organizational change, and designed numerous training programs working often with white people around white supremacy and men around patriarchy. Tim is an active leader with Bay Area based organization, STAND which works with white men and others who benefit from race and gender based privilege to become committed actors for collective liberation. They bring over a decade of experience as a mindfulness practitioner in the Vipassana lineage of Buddhism, and have spent over 150 days on silent meditation retreat.

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Sharon directed all Ruckus Programs, managed the implementation of Ruckus’s strategic priorities, and cultivated strategic partnerships with ally organizations and frontline partners. Sharon was instrumental in shifting Ruckus practices and methodologies towards centering the voices and actions of frontline and impacted communities . She was a co-convener of the Mobilization for Climate Justice West (2008-2011), has served on the coordinating committee of the International Global Women’s Strike.

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Fatimah has over 7 years of teaching experience at the secondary level and currently teaches 10th/12th grade English with an emphasis in Ethnic Studies at Fremont High School in East Oakland. She is a Teacher Fellow through Community Responsive Education for their Youth Wellness Index Project and a Senior Fellow with Agency by Design Oaklands Teacher Fellowship in partnership with Project Zero (PZ) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Fatimah is also an alum of the Graduate Education Diversity Internship (GEDI) through the American Evaluation Association. In her spare time she co-facilitates an out-of-school-time program at Fremont High called Sistas of Fremont where she trains young African-American girls on how to engage in their own praxis by learning youth participatory action research (YPAR) skills. Fatimah received her Master of Arts degree in Education (emphasis in Teaching) in 2018 from Mills Graduate School of Education and her Bachelors of Arts degree in Ethnic Studies in 2014 from Mills College.

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Hop was awarded a certificate of completion from the Leadership, Organizing and Action Program in Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Executive Education.

He earned his Master’s Degree in Urban Sustainability at Antioch University, Los Angeles, where he also served as a Climate Justice Fellow and adjunct professor. He sits on the Los Angeles Food Policy Council’s Leadership Circle and has served on the boards of the Community Coalition for Environmental Justice, Western States Center, and People’s College of Law.

Hop was a certified arborist, has earned a Permaculture Design Certificate, and is a master gardener. He and his wife of twenty years homeschool their daughters on an urban homestead inhabited by their pet Australian shepherds, chickens, honey bees, fruit trees, and multiple compost piles.

En Español

Lucía de la Fuente Somoza (ella) ha trabajado dentro de las prisiones de California durante la última década, facilitando y capacitando programas de rehabilitación sensibles al trauma, basados en los principios y prácticas de justicia restaurativa. Lucía tiene un doctorado en Antropología y Cambio Social y es la ex Directora de Programas del GRIP Training Institute, una organización sin fines de lucro del Área de la Bahía que atiende a personas privadas de la libertad en el estado de California y cuya misión es “crear el cambio personal y sistémico para convertir la violencia y el sufrimiento en oportunidades para el aprendizaje y la sanación”. Trabajó en la traducción lingüística y la adaptación cultural del programa Victim-Offender Education Group (VOEG por sus siglas en inglés) y el Programa Guiando la Rabia Hacia el Poder (GRIP por sus siglas en inglés), diseñando planes de estudios y materiales didácticos específicamente para servir a nuestra comunidad latine. Ella es una facilitadora certificada, con experiencia en programas y círculos de justicia restaurativa. Su trabajo se enfoca en brindar apoyo a víctimas, sobrevivientes, personas privadas de la libertad/afectadas por los sistemas de justicia y miembros de la comunidad que han sido dañados por la violencia y los sistemas estructurales de opresión.

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Ananda’s early activism included mobilizing anti-war protests, organizing direct action against multinational forestry and mining corporations, and unionizing his fellow tree-planters to advance an ecosystem-based forestry agenda. Over the last decade, Ananda co-convened the Climate Justice Alliance, a network of frontline communities organizing a Just Transition away from the global extractive economy, and towards local, living, caring and sharing ones. He convened the leadership team that mobilized the international People’s Climate March in 2014. He also convened Building Equity and Alignment for Impact, an initiative aimed at shifting philanthropic resources to, and centering the place-based leadership of Black, Brown and Indigenous communities on the frontlines of ecological crises.

Ananda presently serves as an organizer, strategy advisor, strategist and board member for a variety of grassroots movement organizations such as Just Transition Alliance, Indigenous Food & Freedom School, Shaping Change Collaborative and Labor Network for Sustainability.

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Elli served for four years as the Diversity and Equity Point Person and Founding Chair of the Diversity & Equity Committee on the Board of Directors of the Association of Dispute Resolution of Northern California (ADRNC). For the past fifteen years, Elli has also served on the Board of Directors of Diversity 2000, helping to design and facilitate innovative gatherings for diversity and social change practitioners to engage in transformative dialogue and thought-leadership on issues of JEDI.

Among other professional contexts, Elli has served as the principal of a rural start-up school in southern India, the Managing Director of a social justice arts nonprofit in Washington DC, a Fulbright researcher and report co-author on institutional racism with the New Zealand Human Rights Commission, the Managing Director of an educational equity nonprofit, and the Director of a school-based Restorative Justice program through a California community conflict resolution center.

Elli is the founder and lead consultant of The Ripple Collective, a consulting collective of womxn facilitators, who work at the intersection of conflict transformation and JEDI to provide coaching, training, and facilitation that creates inclusive spaces, supports organizational transformation, and supports groups through generative conflict while attending to power dynamics.

They love community potlucks and live with their partner and 7 year-old in a multi-generational family village in the San Francisco Bay Area (unceded Lisjan Ohlone land).

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Aryeh has designed and implemented dozens of dynamic training programs and several bodies of curriculum with grassroots organizations, communities, universities and prisons around the world, working primarily at the intersection of leadership development, racial justice and climate resilience. She brings two decades of somatic practice and trauma-informed mindfulness training, incorporating a variety of holistic and creative methods into her work. She speaks fluent Spanish and holds two Masters’ Degrees in Education and International Relations.

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Soerny was born and raised in Jamaica Plain, MA, surrounded by connections to their Dominican heritage in forms of music, food, and familial proximity. Soerny has enjoyed expressing her artistry performing on local stages as a dancer, actor, and director. Soerny recently relocated to Silver Spring, MD with intention to connect to herself in new ways.