Ernesto "Eroc" Arroyo-Montano is an educator, artist, facilitator, organizer, youth worker, community activist and a proud father of three. Known for his leadership in a range of initiatives from youth program development and intersectional movements building, he has shown his dedication to racial, gender, economic and environmental justice. His contagious passion, warmth and laughter are perhaps his trademark qualities; qualities that he hopes inspires those around him to join the ever evolving movement for peace and justice.

Kenneth started his activism in the early eighties as a teenager, working in his neighborhood for tenants’ rights and decent housing, targeting the St. Louis Housing Authority. He went on to work for COOL, a national campus-based student organizing program, and then moved to Boston where he worked for the Ten Point Coalition, Interaction Institute for Social Change, and Third Sector New England, as well as being on the Board for Resource Generation. Most recently he has been a trainer and a consultant, primarily on issues of organizational development and community building.

Mia Birdsong is a family and community visionary and storyteller who has spent more than 20 years fighting for the self-determination and pointing out the brilliant adaptations of everyday people. Mia, whose 2015 TED talk “The Story We Tell About Poverty Isn’t True” has been viewed over 1.5 million times already, has been widely published and speaks at universities and conferences across the country. Mia is a modern Renaissance woman, having spent time organizing to abolish prisons, teaching teenagers about sex and drugs, interviewing literary luminaries like Edwidge Danticat, David Foster Wallace, and John Irving, keeping bees, and attending births as a midwifery apprentice. Mia is an inaugural Ascend Fellow of The Aspen Institute, a New America California Fellow, and sits on the Board of Directors of Forward Together. She lives, dreams, and explores joy in Oakland, CA.

Liz Dawes Duraisingh works at Project Zero, a research center at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) where she co-directs Out of Eden Learn, an online learning community and research program that promotes thoughtful cross-cultural inquiry and exchange among young people around the world. She also co-directs Creating Communities of Innovation, an initiative that fosters inquiry-driven and innovation-focused professional development across a diverse network of schools in the Middle East. Liz additionally serves as Lecturer on Education at HGSE and was formerly a high school history teacher in England and Australia.

Sarah J. Jackson is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and faculty affiliate of the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies Program and Department of Cultures, Societies & Global Studies at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. She is an expert on media, race, and activism and serves on the executive board of editors of Signs, the world’s leading feminist journal. Jackson explored the cultural significance of African American celebrity protest and journalism in her first book, Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press. Her second book, under contract with MIT Press, examines how racial justice and gender justice activists use Twitter. As a public scholar, Jackson is regularly called upon as an expert by national and international news outlets.

Alvaro Lima is Director of Research at the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA). Prior to his work at the BPDA, he was the Senior Vice President and Director of Research for the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC). He also served as the Director of Economic Development for the Urban Edge Housing Corporation and the Chief of the Economic Development Department of the Ministry of Industry in Mozambique. In his native Brazil, Alvaro served as the Coordinator of Regional Development Projects for the Institute for Social and Economic Research. He has a Master degree in political economy from the New School for Social Research in New York.

Interdisciplinary artist, Jane D. Marsching explores our past, present and future human impact on the environment through collaborative research-based practices. Projects have been sited in museums and galleries as well as weather observatories, public parks, city streets, radio waves, and the internet. She is a cofounder and member of Platform2: Art and Activism (2009-2012), an experimental forum about creative practices at the intersection of social issues. At Massachusetts College of Art and Design she is Professor and Sustainability Fellow and tries to teach in as many different departments as possible.

Gabriel is a researcher and project manager specializing in civic media. He is coordinating a national study on civic media innovation and also supports both Boston Civic Media and Community IRB. Gabriel earned his PhD from the Syracuse University School of Information Studies where his dissertation research looked at newcomers to digital participatory platforms. At Syracuse, Gabriel worked as a researcher on a multi-year project exploring newcomer learning and motivation to citizen science projects at Zooniverse.org. His research interests also include community informatics and both online and offline instances of commons-based peer production. Gabriel is the founder of the Transformative Culture Project, a nonprofit that supports career development for young media professionals across southern New England. He is an affiliate of the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and an affiliate faculty at Emerson College.

Sarah Sheya is the Project Administrator and Media Specialist for the Out of Eden Learn project. Out of Eden Learn is a global learning platform and research project at Project Zero at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Sheya’s research interests include the ways in which arts and media, specifically photography, impact how youth engage in dialogue across and among cultures and contexts, as well as how art and media can support young people from marginalized groups to be the leaders in representing themselves and their stories. Sheya has a B.A. from American University in Multimedia Journalism, Arabic Language, and Arab Studies and an M.A.T. in Modern Foreign Language Education: Arabic from Boston University. Before joining Project Zero in 2014, she worked in the nonprofit sector as a youth program director and media specialist and continues to work as a teaching artist, leading youth photography workshops.

Ellie Tiglao is a chef and community organizer who in 2014 co-founded Olio Culinary Collective, a worker-owned business dedicated to sustainable sourcing, workplace fairness and the celebration of food as culture. She runs a Filipino-American food pop up; manages the community at the tech and arts coworking space, Industry Lab; and is a founding member of the Greater Boston Chamber of Cooperatives.

EMW Community Space, fondly known as EMW Bookstore, is a community-oriented space and resource for peoples from marginalized identities to pursue our creative visions. Through creative and cultural work in arts & technology, EMW’s mission is to affirm, celebrate, and work in solidarity with marginalized communities to facilitate creativity and education, safety and wellbeing, and capacity-building toward a more liberatory world. We stress the importance of rooting our values of sharing, trust, respect, and mutual support in all EMW Bookstore activities, because we believe that our programs are at the core of our mission and our vision to expand the concept of family to our immediate community and greater society.

Deb Todd Wheeler produces installations, photographs, and sculptural objects that explore the aesthetic impact of human productivity. Her work considers the clash between the desire to be productive, to be industrious, to push technology forward, and the fraught consequences this desire reaps.

Carlos Rojas Álvarez graduated from Boston Latin School in 2012. He became involved with the Student Immigrant Movement (SIM), Youth on Board (YOB) and the Boston Student Advisory Council (BSAC), where he led major campaigns for school discipline reform, the inclusion of student opinion in educator evaluations and sat on the Boston School Committee as the student representative in the 2011-2012 school year. When his status barred him from enrolling in college, Carlos became an Education Policy Associate at Youth on Board and the New England representative to the National Coordinating Committee of the United We Dream (UWD) Network. He served as the Campaign Coordinator for the Student immigrant Movement (SIM) from 2013 until the spring of 2016, where he led the Dare to Dream Campaign, to both establish DREAM schools and to pass in-state tuition and state financial aid for undocumented students in Massachusetts. Last year (2016), he served as the Student Field Director for the Save Our Public Schools campaign. Carlos is currently the strategic facilitation and development consultant for the Boston Education Justice Alliance (BEJA) and the Director of Special Projects for Youth on Board (YOB).  

Stacey Cordeiro is a Co-op Organizer and founder of the Boston Center for Community Ownership (bcco.coop). She provides education & training, facilitation, and technical assistance to worker co-ops and other community owned businesses. In this work, she uses popular education methods to build upon the knowledge and experience of the members, includes team building and leadership development to build personal and collective power, and translates complex business and economic concepts into plain language so that co-op members can be responsible and savvy entrepreneurs. Stacey holds a Masters in City Planning from MIT, and has provided technical assistance to cooperatives through the Cooperative Development Institute, and Cooperative Economics for Women.