Theme: Youth Leadership
Saturday, December 5th
December 5th | 11:05 am to 11:12 am
Keynote
The Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company
| The Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company
The Destiny Arts Youth Performance Company’s extraordinary energy, brilliant choreography and inspired lyrics have been rocking the house at Bioneers for many years. A program of Destiny Arts Center, an Oakland-based violence prevention/arts education nonprofit, the company is a multicultural group of teens that creates original performance art combining hip-hop, dance, theater, martial arts, song, and rap. It has performed locally and nationally since 1993 and has been the subject of two documentary films. DAYPC’s artistic directors are: Sarah Crowell & Rashidi Omari.
Sunday, December 6th
In this moment of unraveling, a new generation of Black, Indigenous, Latinx and other people of color leaders are generating creative strategic innovations and interventions to combat extractive economic systems and usher in a Just Transition to a new civilization. Join key figures from some of the most dynamic frontline organizations at the forefront of this movement-Climate Justice Alliance, Movement Generation, and New Economy Coalition-as they share stories and practices. They will discuss how they are working to: cultivate local, loving, living, linked communities; democratize the economy (#WealthBack); restore sovereignty (#LandBack); localize control of wealth (#Reinvest); and restore social and ecological well-being ( #JustTransition). Hosted by Natalia Linares, New Economy Coalition. With: Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan, Movement Generation; Doria Robinson, Cooperation Richmond & Urban Tilth; Najari Smith, Cooperation Richmond & Rich City Rides.
December 6th | 12:30 pm to 1:45 pm
Panelists
Doria Robinson
Executive Director | Urban Tilth
Doria Robinson, a 3rd-generation resident of Richmond, California and Executive Director of Urban Tilth, is a co-founder of Cooperation Richmond, a worker-owned cooperative developer and local loan fund. Doria previously worked: on organic farms in Massachusetts; at Veritable Vegetable, a women-owned organic produce distribution company; at Real Food Company; and at Mixed Nuts Food Co-op. A Certified Permaculture Designer, she also led the development of Urban Tilth’s 3-acre urban farm in Richmond and the Farm-to-Table CSA social entrepreneurial venture that now serves 440 West County families each week.
Najari Smith
Executive Director | Rich City Rides
Najari Smith, Richmond, CA-based founder and Executive Director of Rich City Rides, former chair and still member of the Richmond Bicycle Pedestrian Advisory Committee, has worked tirelessly to improve bike infrastructure and to use bicycles to unite neighborhoods and communities throughout the Bay Area, including by creating the biggest bicycle celebrations in Richmond’s history.
Natalia Linares
Communications Organizer | New Economy Coalition
Natalia Linares, Communications Organizer at the New Economy Coalition, has over a decade of experience as a cultural organizer, artist advocate, and publicist working to amplify voices from traditionally underrepresented communities. In 2010 Natalia founded Conrazón, an agency for artists and creators invested in new paradigms of heart-centered economic justice in the performing arts and media.
Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan
| Movement Generation
Michelle Mascarenhas-Swan, a member of the Movement Generation (MG) staff collective who has been on its planning committee since 2008, has worked for the last 25 years building movement vehicles for frontline communities. Prior to her work at MG, she co-led the Center for Food and Justice, the National Farm to School Initiative, Rooted in Community, and the School of Unity and Liberation. Michelle was also a founding co-chair of the Climate Justice Alliance and the Our Power Campaign and was recently named an Ashoka Fellow (2017-2020).
Saturday, December 12th
NOTE: This is a 120-minute session in which we will break up into 5 cohorts of 6-8 people, so register early because it is limited to 35 participants.
This session will be an interactive intergenerational futurist role-playing game in which people of all ages will collaborate to create a new future based on resilience and justice, centering the vision and leadership of younger generations. Participants will be placed into separate groups of 6-8 people who will then embark on an immersive journey through an eco-futurist, post-apocalypse world. Upon registration, you will receive a packet that explains the game, and each of us will select a specific character to embody in the scenario.
A game master will facilitate each separate cohort. The intention is to be in the play and practice of collective decision-making for resilience and justice, honoring the wisdom and visions that different generations and identities hold. Youth participants will make up the majority in every cohort, ensuring that youth voices are centered in self-determining the world of the future.
At the end of the game, the whole larger group will come back together and each team will share the choices they made and how those decisions shaped their outcomes. Inevitably, each group will have made different choices based on who was in the room and whose voices were most valued. This game is also designed to help demonstrate the multiplicity of imagined futures that we could step into at any given moment. By exploring themes of apocalypse and resilience through play, we open up space for radically imagining what is possible together from a place of curiosity and possibility.
If you are a youth (age 13 – 22) that would like to register for this session on scholarship, please email maya@bioneers.org.
December 12th | 2:00 pm to 3:30 pm
Panelists
Lil Milagro Henriquez
Founder and Executive Director | Mycelium Youth Network
Lil Milagro Henriquez, founder (in 2017) and Executive Director of Mycelium Youth Network, an organization dedicated to empowering young people of color around climate change issues, is a veteran of social justice organizing with 18+ years' experience working on a range of issues, including: access to higher education for low-income people and communities of color; food sovereignty; environmental racism; and labor organizing; among others. She is a current recipient of a Women's Earth Alliance fellowship.
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