Chioma Oruh

Chioma Oruh is the health justice project director at Advocates for Justice and Education, where she serves as principal investigator leading project implementation alongside a team of advocates, organizers, and directly impacted families navigating DC’s systems of care for children and youth with disabilities and special health care needs. Her work is grounded in her roles as a mother, disability justice seeker, doula, and community caregiver. As a public policy expert and scholar of matriarchal theory, her intellectual north star is the critical re-examination of mother-work as a political framework. Chioma is a former professor at Howard University and Georgetown University and holds degrees from The George Washington University and Howard University.

Denali Joie

Denali Joie (she/they) is a Jamaican-born, Southern California-based Black trans femme narrative artist, writer, fashion griot, and culture bearer. Her multidisciplinary practice moves fluidly across mediums, including fashion as textual tool, writing, theatre, photography, film, performance, and collaborative community activations, to tell stories that reconnect memory, identity, and collective possibility. Drawing on Afro-Indigenous cosmologies, queerness, and masquerade traditions such as Jonkonnu, Denali approaches storytelling as both cultural transmission and worldbuilding. Her work treats the body, garment, and spoken and written word as living archives—sites where history, imagination, and liberation converge. Denali’s work has been featured in international exhibitions and supported by fellowships from the California Arts Council, Center for Craft, and the Center for Cultural Power.

JM Wong

JM Wong (they/them) is a queer child of the Chinese diaspora living on Duwamish lands (Seattle) via Malaysia/Singapore and many cities in between. They write about bodily movements, desire, and longings across distances and bordered spaces. They hope their writing exists not solely to interpret or philosophize the world but as a contribution to changing it.

Matt Nelson

Matt Nelson is a Colombian-born, Midwestern-raised organizer and strategist, and the executive director of Presente.org, the nation’s largest digital Latine organizing hub. Previously, he served as the organizing director at Color Of Change. Matt has launched several cooperative community spaces, including cafés, a legal clinic, a community center, a music venue, and a pizzeria. He was featured in the book Ferguson Is America: Roots of Rebellion and has supported or co-edited several social movement titles, including Turnout! Mobilizing Voters in an Emergency, How We Win, and If We Want to Win: A Latine Vision for a New American Democracy.

Mordecai Ettinger

Mordecai Cohen Ettinger dreams big and has dedicated the last 30 (something) years of their life to building the world we all deserve. Mordecai is founding director of Health Justice Commons, the senior development advisor of Sins Invalid, and has served as senior adjunct lecturer at the California Institute of Integral Studies since 2014. They teach neurobiology and consciousness and the brain courses. Mordecai’s research spans environmental health, the Medical Industrial Complex, the neurobiology of the social nervous system, and its implications with regard to historical trauma, healing, resilience, collective liberation, and creating just, sustainable futures.

Nancy Netherland

Nancy Netherland is a California-based Medicaid policy and caregiver engagement specialist with more than 15 years of experience advancing family-centered systems in Medi-Cal, child health, and community care. She is a senior specialist with Family
Voices of California and was recently elected chair of the California Medicaid Children’s Health Advisory Panel. She is also a parent to two former foster children with complex, rare, and special health care needs, bringing lived caregiver expertise alongside professional experience in program implementation, stakeholder engagement, and translating policy into practice to center children and families in health system design.

Nicky Tettamanti

Nicky Tettamanti is a social epidemiologist, healthcare reform strategist, and organizer based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work asks how collective power can transform an extractive healthcare industry into one that genuinely serves people. Drawing on public health, economics, and lived experience, she moves across academia, philanthropy, and labor to advance affordable healthcare initiatives that improve health outcomes.

NTanya Lee

Originally from a small working class Black community in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, NTanya is a lifelong lover of trees, Black people, and making change. Radicalized by Reaganomics in middle school, she has been an activist and organizer in US movements for racial, gender, and economic justice for over 40 years. For 10 years she helped lead LeftRoots, training frontline organizers as liberatory strategists. In 2023, she stepped into full-time caregiving for her family. She is currently focused on projects that address the hyper-alienated, deeply disconnecting social conditions of working class life and struggle in the US.

Tiffany López

Tiffany became a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner because of her own experiences with loved ones who had not received the healing they hoped for when using Western medicine alone. Since obtaining her acupuncture license, she has provided and advocated for equitable access to TCM and other modalities. She believes that all healing practices should be affordable and equally accessible to all people in order to ensure our own good health and that of our society. In her day-to-day life, she enjoys nerding out over nature, the universe, speculative/science fiction, camping, and writing.

Warinda Johnson

Warinda Johnson is an organizer with Central Texas Interfaith (CTI), a non-partisan, multi-issue coalition of congregations, schools, worker organizations, public health clinics, and nonprofits that work together to address issues affecting the wellbeing of families and neighborhoods. Drawing upon 20+ years’ experience of interviewing, investigation, and storytelling, Warinda identifies, develops, and promotes community leaders, training them to share and shape their stories and build connections with others in order to implement public action. Warinda’s most recent work includes coordination of CTI’s partnership with Austin Parks and Recreation and Austin Independent School District to explore equitable access to Austin’s green spaces.

Zoë Gammell Brown

Zoë Gamell Brown is descended from Dawn Cleopatra Felicity Grace Gamell Brown, Shirley Haynes, Louisa Correia, and Nganga Pattie Lawrence. Gamell carries Boviander ancestral knowledge of river and ritual care from Essequibo and Pomeroon to Wapato Island. She is an East Coast-born, Gulf Coast-raised storyteller and steward of zinkisi bibichi, a meditation and medicine monastery. Their work weaves somatic contemplation and regenerative interdependence.

Gamell was born into the Nichiren Daishonin Buddhist tradition and honors her ancestral Obeah wisdom. Over a decade into sobriety, they bring a deep commitment to protecting intergenerational earth stories and healing practices. Gamell offers spacetime for ancestral wisdom and creative sovereignty to be centered through zinkisi bibichi, their work with Wapato Island Farm, and their ecological and emotional rematriation scholarship. Her understanding of matriarchy is grounded in eros, reciprocity, and devotion to earth as mentor, teacher, and kin.

Gamell is a University of Oregon PhD candidate, Ecotrust Madrona Fellow for Food Systems Leaders, and a member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Loka Initiative’s Preparing Religious Environmental Plans inaugural cohort. They are honored to have received support from the Seeding Justice Lilla Jewel Award, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Sovereignty 360, Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, Portland All-Nations Canoe Family, Kalliopeia Foundation, Ecowomanist C.I.R.C.L.E., The Ahimsa Collective, National Education for Women’s Leadership, and more.