Aja Minor, MA

Aja Minor is an educator with varied experience in social justice organizations from London to the San Francisco Bay Area.  She dedicated her time to sharing Global, Human Rights and Popular Education curriculum with educational institutions across the world.  Aja is a self professed Nerd, and was fueled to create social change through her study of International Studies, Music, Anthropology and Migration.  She has worked with the Anti-Slavery International, Women of Color Resource Center, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, Global Exchange and Bay Area Community Resources.  She is passionate about providing low-income youth of color with access to global education and ensuring global education is critical and socially responsible!

aManda Green, MBA    

aManda was raised between the Bay Area and Rio, Brazil.  Since 2002 she has been involved in various arts and environmental educational programs in Santa Fé, Oakland, Bahia Brazil and Southern India.  In this time she has used collective art initiatives, ecological education and permaculture as a way to create dialog and exchange learning and experience across cultural divide. In 2006 aManda received her B.A. in Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Communities from New College of California.  She recently received a MBA in Sustainable Enterprise (Green MBA) from Dominican University driven by the belief that the current paradigm of ‘development’ can be transformed into one that is valued based on ecological regeneration and social equity.   She currently serves as the Co-Director of Youth SEED (Social Entrepreneurship for Equitable Development) a youth leadership organization based in Oakland California.  agreene@bayareayouthseed.org

Gerardo Marin

Gerardo is a Food Justice healer, cultural activist, facilitator, musician, and inner-resilience educator.  Gera coordinates cultural empowerment and activism that empowers youth and families to increase community vitality, create equitable food systems, and energize our shift to harmonious living. He is Co-director of Rooted in Community, a network of young leaders from communities of color and low-income rural areas that amplifies the creative power of youth for transforming culture and advancing food justice nationally.  In addition, Gerardo offers strategic planning, leadership development, and facilitation to grassroots organizations in the U.S. and abroad. He facilitates a range of workshops in inner-resilience through expressive arts, movement, meditation, and healing ritual. Gera is a practitioner of healing arts based in Mexican tradition, Chinese acupressure, and weaves his offerings for boosting our movements of peace, healing, power and justice.  He has been recognized and supported by the San Francisco Foundation’s 5 year Koshland Civic Unity Fellowship and the Art of Living Foundation City Leadership Corp. Gerardo graduated from Colorado State University and is based in Oakland, CA where he studies and plays indigenous flute and drums.

Joshua Bloom

Joshua received his Bachelors in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he became involved as a student-activist. He was the Organizing Director for a key campaign to obtain more funding for student initiated outreach efforts to low income students of color in California. 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, academic counseling, music & media and advocacy. Joshua is a San Francisco native and takes a lot of pride in his experience with the diverse communities of the entire Bay Area. 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 is also a hip-hop artist, and believes that music is essential to understanding and uplifting our people.

Kelley Abraham, MA

Kelley Abraham, began working with the “Todos: Sherover Simms Alliance Building Institute” co-leading anti-oppression and alliance building workshops for young people and adults around race, gender, class, heterosexism, and ageism in 2001. She went on to develop and facilitate workshops using the “Todos” model independently for small groups and organizations committed to surfacing and uprooting institutional, interpersonal, and personal oppressive cultures and practices. She has been engaged in youth and community development work since 1999. She has a Master of Arts in Teaching from Bard College and Bachelor of Arts in History from San Francisco State University. She is a proud alumni of all four the Peralta Colleges where she began her college career. She is a part of the White Noise Collective, and is currently co-leading Camp Little Notch’s, Girls Program as Camp Director.

Levana Saxon, M.Ed

Levana develops strategic methodology, curriculum and training projects to support movement building with the Movement Strategy Center. Over the last 17 years she has trained and facilitated thousands of children, youth and adults. As a youth activist, she served as the North American Advisor to the United Nations Environment Programme, co-founded the Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Youth Alliance and facilitated international gatherings with Youth for Environmental Sanity. Later (as an adult) she taught Ecopedagogy, an arts-based form of popular education for ecological justice at the University of São Paulo in Brazil and helped organize the World Education Forum while working with the Paulo Freire Institute. At Rainforest Action Network, she developed a national climate education program for children and youth and worked on agribusiness and global finance campaigns. She left RAN to re-focus on her passion for popular education, working to support Youth-Led Participatory Action Research projects with Youth In Focus, and then starting Practicing Freedom. She also currently blogs and facilitates anti-racism trainings and dialogues with the White Noise Collective.

Teléjon Quinn – bio and photo forthcoming

Zara Zimbardo, MA

Zara Zimbardo, MA, 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. For the last fifteen years she has been a body-based therapist both in private practice and community health centers. She was the producer of an award-winning alternative current events television series highlighting grassroots movements for social and environmental justice, and has developed critical media literacy workshops, presentations, and curricula in collaboration with a wide range of schools throughout the Bay Area, from elementary to graduate level. As a member of the National Council of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the nation’s oldest interfaith peace organization, she has worked in solidarity with nonviolent activists resisting militarism in the U.S., Israel/Palestine and Colombia. Currently she participates with various anti-racism programs, including the White Noise Collective that she co-founded, as a facilitator using critical dialogue and Theatre of the Oppressed, a form of community-based education that uses theatre exercises as tools for transformation. Ongoing research interests include the politics of representation; Islamophobia; collective memory; U.S. militarism; and nonviolent social movements.