Who We Are

Bio

Akua is an Earth Steward, Strategist, Resource Organizer, Transformative Facilitator, Reiki Master, Energetic Healer and Diviner. Akua began learning Reiki 25 years ago in reaction to learning about the toxic and violent way corporations and governments were treating her family, her community, and the land. Rooted in New Mexico and Louisiana, Akua’s work is inspired by the black and indigenous land stewards who taught her organizing and the necessity of healing and working at the root of things. She focuses on solidarity, organizing, political education, and transformative facilitation to create the new systems we need and uproot the systems that harm us.

Your current political home(s), org(s) & role(s), or job(s):

Black Land Strategies Director at the BlackOUT Collective, Drinking Gourd Member and Wildfire Project Facilitator

Areas of expertise

Akua works to build networks and design projects that help black, indigenous, and multi class multi racial communities build trust, practice shared governance, and build shared language, culture, resource and power. Rooted in abolition, dual power, transformative justice, black queer and an emerging afroeco-feminism, she has done lead thinking and work to design tools structures and startegies for national groups networks such as: M4BL, NBFJA, BlackOUT, Wildfire Project, Black Land & Liberation Initiative and Climate Justice Alliance. 

Bio

Andy is a formerly incarcerated facilitator focused on issues of masculinity and mass incarceration. He has started multiple organizations in NYC like Occupy Sandy and the NYC chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice. He recently left his position as Electoral Manager at the Florida-based racial justice organization the Dream Defenders.

Your current political home(s), org(s) & role(s), or job(s):

Wildfire Facilitator

Areas of expertise

Currently, he specializes in healthy group formation, healthy feedback structures, strategic planning processes, and working towards a greater mastery of somatic healing and circle work.

Bio

BJ is an experience designer committed to a thriving, just, and sustainable world. Through experiential facilitation and consulting, BJ develops transformative leaders, creative community, liberatory institutions, and powerful movement groups. BJ came alive as a trainer with Generation Waking Up, The Work That Reconnects, and has trained at Rockwood Leadership, Landmark Forum, Animas Valley Institute, Theater of the Oppressed, and Training for Change.

Today they are a facilitator at the Wildfire Project, a consultant at Moral Choice, curator of Black Folks Dinner Seattle, and lead anchor of First, We Grieve.

10 years of facilitation, 18 years of praxis, and 34 years inside a queer black body have elicited keen sight, grounded presence, and a tendency toward blessed unrest.

Your current political home(s), org(s) & role(s), or job(s):

Wildfire Project, The Work That Reconnects

Areas of expertise

Group facilitation, retreat planning, transformational training, strategic planning, leadership & Staff Retreats, Convenings, Creative Facilitation, Grief Tending, Equity & Power.

Bio

Cat Salonek has organized for nearly 15 years across movement and national groups. Her current work as the Director of Organizing and Policy at OutFront Minnesota is focused on building a statewide base of trans and queer folks to challange business as usual. Cat has spent time union organizing with Communication Workers of America where she led a campaign with immgiration court interpreters that ultimately won an important case that will impact freelance workers for years. She cut her teeth on national organizing with an Occupy Wall Street offshoot, Occupy Homes MN, an organization dedicated to holding Big Banks accountable for the chaos they impose on those who can least withstand it. She worked with community members to hold down multi-week home occupations that resulted in multi-billion dollar national settlements. Cat has trained thousands of new and experienced organizers and raised well over a million dollars in grassroots funds for our movement. In her free time she loves to play with her niece and nephews and sing loudly whenever she can.

Your current political home(s), org(s) & role(s), or job(s):

Director of Organizing and Policy, OutFront Minnesota, Wildfire Facilitator

Areas of expertise

Group facilitation, retreat planning, organizing skill training, transformational training, strategic planning, fundraising, nonviolent direct action and blockade tactics.

Bio

Claire is a Minneapolis-based union and community organizer, a birth doula, and big book nerd. She has previous experience in social movement work fighting unjust foreclosures with Occupy Homes MN and as a core team member with Black Lives Matter Minneapolis. Her electoral organizing work came as the Campaign Manager for Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s re-election in 2020 and for Minneapolis’ rent stabilization ballot measure in 2021. She is currently leading organizing work with cleaners, security guards, and airport workers at the Service Employees International Union (SEIU).

Your current political home(s), org(s) & role(s), or job(s):

Lead Organizer, SEIU Local 26; Wildfire Facilitator

Areas of expertise

Organizing skills training, transformational training, equity and power, electoral campaign organizing, union/labor organizing, helping groups hold complexities and nuances in their work.

Bio

Jonel Edwards is a 28 year older leader in the community power building organization, Dream Defenders. Originally from Miramar, Florida by way of Jamaica, Jonel entered the world of activism after the murder of Trayvon Martin, putting together marches on her college campus at the University Of Florida. During that time Jonel became politicized and involved with the Dream Defenders on her campus becoming a chapter leader. Shortly after her graduation in 2013 she was brought onto Dream Defender staff as an organizer working with local Dream Defender membership across North Florida. Over the past five years Jonel has gone from campus member, organizer, youth organizer, Wildfire Project trainer, Training & Membership Development Director, to Co Executive Director for the Dream Defenders where she plays an important role in the next evolution of the Dream Defenders organization. Jonel has also been heavily influenced by the work of her siblings across the globe, from Palestine, to Brasil, to south Africa and beyond who have demonstrated what collective work towards liberation must look like! “This work has transformed me, everyday I rediscover my voice, my power, my dignity, and my community.”

Your current political home(s), org(s) & role(s), or job(s):

Co-Executive Director, Dream Defender, Leftroots Member, Wildfire Facilitator

Areas of expertise

Group Facilitation, Retreat Planning, Political Education

Bio

Joshua Kahn (he/him) is a social movement facilitator and leadership coach who has trained thousands of activists across the globe. He has spent the last 20 years as an organizer, campaign strategist, and non-violent direct action coordinator. Joshua is the Executive Director of The Wildfire Project, and spent 17 years as a facilitator with the Ruckus Society. 

He has helped campaigns win – defending land, water, and workers rights – from banks, oil companies, logging corporations, and coal barons, in local, national, and international arenas. 

Joshua has written and co-edited several books and manuals, most recently: A Line In The Tar Sands: Struggles for Environmental Justice, Beautiful Trouble, and Organizing Cools the Planet: Tools and Reflections to Navigate the Climate Crisis. His new podcast mini-series on Revolutionary Left Radio is called Dialectics & Psychedelics: Transformation and Social Struggles.

Joshua has conducted workshops and group retreats around the world including: Brazil, Turkey, Vietnam, Australia, Canada, Peru, Poland, Thailand, Spain, Denmark, Jamaica, Guatemala, Mexico, and nearly all continental US states.

Your current political home(s), org(s) & role(s), or job(s):

Executive Director, The Wildfire Project

Areas of expertise

Leadership Coaching, Group facilitation, Coalition Process, Campaign Strategy, Non-Violent Direct Action, Conflict Transformation, Leadership Development, Organizing skills, Personal Healing and Transformation, Psychedelic Integration

Bio

Kirin believes in building power through leadership development rooted in healing, strategic training and authentic mentorship. She is a first generation Desi queer femme midwest transplant and she carries the wisdom, strength and resilience of her communities into every aspect of her work. Her work includes environmental justice, queer liberation, racial equity, student organizing, donor organizing and GOTV. Kirin loves cooking, dancing and laughing. Her superpowers are resource mobilization and experiential learning training. You can find Kirin @kirin_rosemary or on a dance floor near you!

Your current political home(s), org(s) & role(s), or job(s):

Wildfire Facilitator, Internal Projects Manager Militia Designs, Financial Doula Training for Change, Advisory Board Member Healing Justice Podcast, CAAV Board Member, 18MillionRising Board Member

Areas of expertise

Donor Organizing, Group facilitation, popular education & political education, campaign planning, network building, building across difference, conflict transformation, Non-Violent Direct Action,  Leadership Development, Organizing skills, Anti-Oppression, retreat planning

Bio

Lex Barlowe (she/her) is a New Yorker with ancestral roots in Virginia, South Carolina, St. Vincent, and Ukraine & the USSR. She got her start organizing around environmental & climate justice in high school and college, and has helped to build local and national networks and campaigns. This introduced her to brilliant community wealth-building and cooperative projects in the solidarity economy movement. That journey has led her to the Central Brooklyn Food Coop and her work as the Community Wealth Facilitator at Black Farmer Fund, a community investment fund investing in Black farmers and food business owners across New York State, where she supports a group of 13 Black farmers and food business owners to design the fund’s democratic process and make collective decisions around investing in their own community.

Lex focuses on how we keep and share and learn from our histories, in our families, communities, and movements. The community seed resources and experiments she’s part of are imagining how to share resources and bring that ancestral wisdom into now. Lex is a facilitator/healer with the Wildfire Project.

Your current political home(s), org(s) & role(s), or job(s):

Wildfire Facilitation Team, Black Farmer Fund, Reclaim Seed NYC, Central Brooklyn Food Coop

Areas of expertise

Group facilitation, popular education & political education, campaign planning, network building, building across difference, conflict transformation, collective governance and decision-making, organization and community history / archiving.

Bio

Lu Aya is the co-founder of The Peace Poets, a Hip Hop and Spoken Word crew from The Bronx that has made an indelible mark on the social movements of our times by supporting the re-emergence of the art of collective singing in protest and direct action. He utilizes many creative mediums for collective healing and liberation in Africa, Asia and across the Americas. As a facilitator with The Wildfire Project, he works with frontline grassroots groups to cultivate a culture of connection that honors ourselves, protects our people and builds our power. He also continues to work at the Kingsbridge Heights Community Center where he has been teaching and learning poetry since 2008 with the teenagers in his neighborhood. Lu is an artist educator, poet journalist, freedom singer, cultural worker who is humbled to be able to learn from his elders, serve his community and dedicate his life to building justice.

Areas of expertise

1. Working across differences/Crossing Boundaries (Race,Class,Gender,Age)
2. Creative and Artistic Organizing
3. Generative Conflict
4. Campaign Strategy
5. Community Building
6. Action Planning

Bio

Michael (they/them) is a facilitator, faith leader, and organizer living in the Northwest Bronx, NYC. They first felt the power of organized communities through queer, feminist, and anti-war student organizing and fighting exploitative developers with the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition. In the wake of the housing crisis, Michael helped bring together Organizing for Occupation (O4O) and Occupy Wall Street to blockade evictions and shut down foreclosure proceedings with song. In 2015, they founded the NYC chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), a national network organizing white people to undermine white supremacy. Currently, Michael is a preacher and Connecting Council Chair at New Day Church, a Bronx-based faith community confronting injustice with the compassion and abundance of God.

Your current political home(s), org(s) & role(s), or job(s):

Education Director, The Wildfire Project; Connecting Council Chair, New Day Church; Learning Somatic Practitioner, generative somatics Practitioners Network

Areas of expertise

conflict transformation, political education, leadership development, transformational facilitation, ritual & ceremony, gender justice, faith & organizing, equity & power/anti-oppression, coaching, white anti-racism/solidarity

Bio

Sachie comes from four generations rooted in the Pacific Northwest. In addition to her work with the Wildfire Project, she is an organizer with the New Economy Coalition, working to build solidarity economies and community self-determination. Sachie co-founded the Reinvest in Our Power Project, Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network and the Maypop Collective for Climate and Economic Justice. Sachie has worked with social justice groups across the US and abroad. Through all of her work, Sachie is committed to nurturing resilient communities, defending our rights to land-labor-livelihood, and building people power from the ground up.

Your current political home(s), org(s) & role(s), or job(s):

Wildfire Facilitator, New Economy Coalition, Maypop Collective

Areas of expertise

Group facilitation, climate justice organizing, political education, equity and power, campaign planning

Bio

Sam is a facilitator, organizer, and action coordinator from New York City. Her commitment is to supporting the development of resilient, courageous, and joyful people and movements. She is the co-founder of Movement Netlab and The New York Action Network and has worked with local, national, and international organizations for over 17 years developing campaigns and coordinating creative direct actions. Some of those include the Ruckus Society, The Other 98%, Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Sandy, and the Climate Justice Alliance.

Your current political home(s), org(s) & role(s), or job(s):

Wildfire Facilitator, Movement Netlab

Areas of expertise

Along with group facilitation, retreat planning, navigating conflict, etc, Sam specializes in supporting groups in thinking through and designing the systems, structures, and culture that are responsive to the unique needs of self organized, distributed networks. She also loves teaching climbing for direct actions and is pretty confident you’d love it too.

Bio

Sherika is a mother to a toddler while being an aspiring revolutionary. As an internationalist, from Miami, Florida by way of Jamaica. Sherika has had the opportunity to learn from movements and freedom fighters in Palestine, Brazil, South Africa and Mexico, among others. Sherika began organizing on the campus of Florida State University with the Dream Defenders, where she eventually became a founding staff member and the South Florida Regional Organizer. In her time with Dream Defenders, she among many initiatives, bodies and campaigns, she supported the group in founding the organization’s Womyn’s Faction, which worked to bring a gender justice lens to the group. Since then, Sherika has been the inaugural Director if the Summer School of Resistance and Co-Director of Militia Design where she worked to shift culture and bring more creatives into the mainstream of the movement. Militia’s drive comes from an understanding that there are many difficult tasks facing society. We have a culture in flux, dissatisfied with the status quo and in desperate need of significant and deep-rooted change. 

Currently Sherika is the Radical Hope Program Director, a program that is a collaboration of women leaders from Central Florida Jobs with Justice, Dream Defenders, Faith in Florida, Fanm Ayisyen nan Miyami/Haitian Women of Miami (FANM), Florida Rights Restoration Coalition, Miami Workers Center, New Florida Majority, Organize Florida and SEIU, among others to embolden a grassroots feminist framework to the work in Florida. In her spare time Sherika is a community doula and artist.

Your current political home(s), org(s) & role(s), or job(s):

Wildfire Facilitator, Militia Design Creative Director, Florida Immigrant Coalition Radical Hope Program Director

Areas of expertise

Political Education, Curriculum Development, Art Eduction, Direct Action Planning, Group facilitation, Conflict Transformation, Leadership Development, Reproductive Justice, Revolutionary Mothering – pending*

Bio

Yotam Marom is an organizer and facilitator based in New York City. He has over fifteen years of experience as a facilitator specializing in experiential education, strategic planning, group dynamics, and conflict work. He was the founding director of the Wildfire Project, and has facilitated in a variety of settings – from organizations like the Dream Defenders, Sunrise and Justice Democrats, to Jewish youth and Palestinian teens in Israel, to national movement moments like Occupy and Flood Wall Street. Yotam was a leader at Occupy Wall Street and a founding member of IfNotNow. Yotam also writes; you can find his writing and more at www.yotammarom.net.

Your current political home(s), org(s) & role(s), or job(s):

Yotam spends most of his time as a rogue facilitator, working with groups like Sunrise, Momentum, Justice Democrats, the Dream Defenders, and others, as well as a facilitator on behalf of Wildfire. He helps organize direct actions from time to time, writes, tells jokes, cooks, and takes good care of his awesome kiddos.

Areas of expertise

Yotam is often invited to take groups through strategic planning processes, and to support groups through internal conflicts (often around power, leadership, and identity). His sweet spot is a combination of the two, with the thought that groups entering into direct conversation about the difficult things lurking beneath the surface both supports good strategy and long-term group health. He has written about that here. Aside from that, Yotam is good at holding complex planning meetings, alignment processes, coalition meetings, and things like that. He has a lot of experience working with folks around issues of race, class, gender, and leadership more generally.

Bio

Brooke Lehman is Co-Director of the Watershed Center, a social justice resource and retreat center in Millerton, NY. She is a faculty member at Institute for Social Ecology and spent many years helping to run Bluestockings Bookstore and Activist Center in NYC. Brooke was deeply involved in the Global Justice Movement and the Occupy Movement, where she focused on helping activists build healthy democratic organizational structures, connect to their own sense of purpose, and become more effective leaders. She offers workshop and retreats on meditation, yoga, leadership, facilitation, communication, democratic decision-making, and organizational development.

Bio

Carinne Luck is an organizer and trainer from Israel, the UK and most recently New York City. Carinne has organized nationally on a range of issues, including human rights, affordable housing, Israel/Palestine, and in support of domestic worker rights. She was a co-founder of J Street, served as Grassroots Campaign Director at MoveOn.org, and had senior roles with Hand in Hand.

Bio

Clayton Thomas Muller is a member of the Treaty #6 based Mathias Colomb Cree First Nation, also known as Pukatawagan, located in in Northern Manitoba, Canada. For the last twelve years he has campaigned across Canada, Alaska and the lower 48 states organizing in hundreds of First Nations, Alaska Native and Native American communities in support of grassroots Indigenous Peoples to defend against the encroachment of the fossil fuel industry. This has included a special focus on the sprawling infrastructure of pipelines, refineries and extraction associated with the Canadian tar sands. Clayton is the ‘Stop It At The Source’ Campaigner with 350.org as well as a founder and organizer with Defenders of the Land. Clayton is involved in many initiatives to support the building of an inclusive movement globally for energy and climate justice.

Bio

Farhad Ebrahimi is an activist, philanthropist, musician, lover of film and literature, hipster, and bicycle snob who lives in Brooklyn. He is the founder and trustee chair of the Chorus Foundation, and a co-founder of the Solidaire Network.

Bio

George Lakey is a writer, trainer, and lifelong activist. His first arrest was in the civil rights movement, his most recent for climate justice. He’s led over 1500 workshops on five continents and was a co-founder of Movement for a New Society , Training for Change, and Earth Quaker Action Team. His recent book, Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians Got it Right – And How We Can Too, published by Melville House, has taken him across the country and the world.

Bio

Harmony Goldberg is a founder and former Co-Director of SOUL: the School Of Unity and Liberation, a social justice movement training center based in Oakland,California. After leaving SOUL, Harmony has focused on providing political education and writing support to emergent national alliances of grassroots organizations based in working class communities of color, primarily the Right to the City Alliance, the National Domestic Workers Alliance and the Excluded Workers Congress. She is also a founding editor of Organizing Upgrade (www.organizingupgrade.com), an online strategy journal for left organizers in the United States.

Bio

Jonathan Smucker is the co-founder and Director of Beyond the Choir, which partners with social justice organizations to craft resonant messaging, plan strategic campaigns, and mobilize larger bases of support. A long-time participant, organizer, trainer, and theorist in grassroots movements for social, economic and ecological justice, Smucker has trained thousands of change agents in campaign strategy, framing and messaging, direct action, and other grassroots organizing skills. He is also the author of the book Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals, published by AK Press.

Bio

Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of the international bestsellers, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The Climate (2014), The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) and No Logo (2000). She is a columnist for The Nation magazine and the Guardian newspaper and is a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine. She is a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellow at The Nation Institute and is on the board of directors for 350.org, the global grassroots movement to solve the climate crisis. (Naomi is currently on leave)

Bio

Rafael Navar
Since early 2012, Rafael Navar has served as the National Political Director for the Communication Workers of America (CWA), the largest Telecommunications union in the world. As one of only two current Latino National Political Directors within organized labor, he is committed to building one of the most progressive rank and file led political programs in the country. Rafael has built a powerful and innovatingve political education program for CWA and beyond. He is also an active member of Mijente.

Bio

Raj Patel is an award-winning writer, activist and academic. He is a Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin and a Senior Research Associate at the Unit for the Humanities at the university currently known as Rhodes University (UHURU), South Africa. He has degrees from the University of Oxford, the London School of Economics and Cornell University, has worked for the World Bank and WTO, and protested against them around the world. Raj is the author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System, and the international bestseller, The Value of Nothing.. He is currently working with director Steve James on a book and film about the global food system.

Bio

Raquel Laviña has been an activist and organizer for over 25 years. She has been drawn to many social justice issues from reproductive rights to educational justice to work against the prison industry. As an organizer, she helped to build some of the nation’s most influential youth organizations, some of which are reaching their 10 year anniversaries. She has served as the National Program Director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights; the Executive Director of the Youth Empowerment Center, which housed 5 youth groups including SOUL, the School of Unity and Liberation; and as the Interim Executive Director of FIERCE!, a nationally recognized LGBT youth organization. Raquel currently serves as the Operations Director the National Domestic Workers Alliance.

Bio

Born in Chennai, South India, and brought up in the United Arab Emirates, Sumitra Rajkumar arrived in New York in the mid 90’s and cut her movement-building teeth in the vibrant racial justice organizing against police brutality of that era. Sumitra has 12 years of experience as a trainer in critical thinking, popular education, political analysis, leadership development, media literacy and documentary storytelling. She has worked with both youth and adults across the ideological, geographical, racial, class, gender and sexuality spectrums and on a broad array of social justice issues. Sumitra is a somatic coach, a trainer with Generative Somatics, and a political educator in multiple movement spaces.

Bio

Willie Baptist is a formerly homeless father who came out of the Watts uprisings, the Black Student Movement, and working as a lead organizer with the United Steelworkers has 40 years of experience organizing amongst the poor including with the National Union of the Homeless, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, the National Welfare Rights Union, the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, and many other networks. Willie serves as the Poverty Initiative Scholar-in-Residence and is the Coordinator of the Poverty Scholars Program.