My activism has ranged from queer and trans intervention in public space to reformative justice in prisons, and from community gardening to movement for student power. In the past 5 years, I have had the honor of working alongside friends and comrades on intersectional struggles for better worlds. While I have had some experience in a wide range of activism, I am currently leaning into qtpoc community organizing, radical media, and housing justice.
My engagement with activism began at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor during the era of the Black Lives Matter Movement. At that time, I began taking courses about society and culture that opened my eyes to different, and critical, ways of looking at the world. Simultaneously, I was surrounded by peers with sharp political analyses who weren’t afraid of taking action or causing a ruckus. I started with community building at the Residential College (RC) at University of Michigan with the RC Student Union, and progressed to co-educational facilitation in the RC’s Feminist Forum and Eco Forums. In the spring and summer of 2015, I had the privilege to share space with the Grace & James Lee Boggs School on Detroit’s east side as an intern. This experience was absolutely crucial for my understanding of revolution, growth, and change. Back at university I continued facilitating and community building in the RC, began holding poetry workshops in a Michigan women’s prison with the Prison Creative Arts Project, and started a job at the Spectrum Center–the United States’ oldest lgbtq+ student resource center. I only left this position in December 2016 as I was preparing to study in Paris from January to July 2017. In Paris I took classes on European politics and utopian social movements, and learned about long histories of class and ethnic struggle from the city’s residents; this was yet another radicalizing period. Returning to Michigan in summer 2017, I started working with Michigan Student Power Network (MSPN). With MSPN I was able to start contributing to campaigns and direct actions aimed at growing student power and bringing justice to campus. A collective of queer and trans activists, called radfun, emerged out of connections and community facilitated in part by MSPN. This collective aimed at transforming student culture through disruptive tactics. We created a Disorientation zine, held a Disorientation party, occupied an oppressively cisheterosexual and white nightclub, held a guerrilla fashion show, and contributed to antifascism-antiwhite supremacy campaigns. Today, I am working to understand the social ecosystems in my new home, Toronto, where I want to engage in radical social formations seeking to uproot capitalism and every system attached to it. So far, I have started volunteering with Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) at University of Toronto — and specifically on the Dr. Chun Resource Library, which OPIRG holds with the Centre for Women and Trans People.
Feel free to contact me with questions, challenges, or proposals regarding activism and organizing.
