Community Activist. Austreberta was born in a small farming town in Mexico and immigrated to the United States in 2001 with her son. Settling in New York, she faced numerous challenges as an immigrant, including limited access to essential services such as healthcare and education for her children.
Determined to support her community, she began advocating for immigrant rights in 2016, focusing on securing access to driver’s licenses for undocumented individuals. She remained actively involved until 2019, working alongside other advocates to help pass legislation “Greenlight Bill” granting immigrant driver’s licenses and municipal IDs in Rockland County. Additionally, she collaborated with the Mexican consulate to facilitate annual visits to the county, ensuring that essential consular services were more accessible to the local immigrant population. Her efforts extended beyond this work, as she also assisted individuals in connecting with their respective consulates and contributed to initiatives supporting local school districts in improving educational opportunities for children.
Currently, Austreberta serves as the leader of organizations “The Best footprints of the Immigrants”, where she continues to educate and empower individuals to advocate for their rights. Her commitment to community organizing and leadership development has played a crucial role in fostering a new generation of advocates within Rockland County.
Farmer, Organizer, Teacher. Since 2012, D has dedicated their life, spirit, and energy to the radical dreams and actions of being in collaboration with many to create spaces of belonging and upliftment as a farmer, teacher, and organizer within food systems work. At that time, D became a student and member of the Farm School NYC community and credits it with providing them with the lens to see a world that requires collective change and the conditions and opportunities to discover their own power and voice. Since then, D has gone on to be a co-founder, worker-owner, and Director of Farm Operations at Rock Steady Farm, where for the last nine years D has worked incredibly hard to help create a project that demonstrates strong values and commitment to their rich communities. D’s work pursues the cultivation of collective liberation through acts of empowerment, growing nourishing food for many with a reverence for nature and with deep relational care of each other and all of our ecosystems.
Tenant and Community Organizer. Based out of Poughkeepsie, New York. Originally from a tourist town in southern Appalachia, June was politicized as a teenager by rapid gentrification and the cruel human cost of the housing crisis. After traveling the country working on electoral campaigns, most notably Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential run, June settled down in the Hudson Valley in 2021 to develop long-term organizing programs that grow working class political power. In the years since, they helped pass tenant protection laws throughout the valley and organized the first ever legally mandated rent reduction in the country. As one of the few tenant organizers in the Mid-Hudson Valley, they help tenants organize associations throughout the region and play an active role in the statewide movement for increased tenant protections. June is also an avid lover of local history and spends their free time rummaging through local bookstores and private library rooms to uncover the long history of tenant struggle in the Hudson Valley. When not organizing or reading, you can find June deep in the woods on a mossy rock by a gurgling brook.
Youth Organizer, Artist. Currently rooted in the Hudson Valley in Poughkeepsie, NY, Lala was born and raised in Sabaneta, Colombia - Her work is guided by her Cultures passion for using creativity as a tool for overcoming challenges and cultivating joy. After her experience of having to leave her home at 15 she has focused her work on creatively opening spaces that help us create a sense of belonging in new environments.
Lala is the youth program co-manager at the Poughkeepsie farm project, where she is able to work with Bipoc youth from the city of Poughkeepsie to heal the relationship we have with sacred land, seeds, water, food and these bodies. This work and her growing up in " casas de la cultura" drove her to opening in a studio called " La raiz" this is a underground space which serves as a incubator that through art and community we can regain a sense of safety- where she holds open studios where People of the world majority of all ages are welcome to come in and learn art making from a visionary fiction, and a radical joyful lens how through community we can create social change.
As a language justice worker all the spaces where Lala moves through become Multilingual spaces, welcoming not only Spanish and English but - shifting the dynamic of the dominant language, creating a space where all feel welcome to share in the languages they feel the most powerful in.
Her previous experience of the Long spoon collective- a collective that grew out of transition towns and permaculture which build a worker movement, living in a moneyless economy, while growing all the food for the"workers" building tiny houses, producing their own medicine and fiber connects her and keeps her center at what is possible when we moved away from capitalism and transactional relationships- she believes we - people of the world majority can reclaim our right to joy, pleasure, safety, community and creativity .
Her most recent curiosities have brought her to study wood block, Restorative justice and meditation to add to the tool belt which she is committed to sharing with the bipoc community in poughkeepsie and hudson valley.
Neuro-queer, non-binary trans activist, educator, visual artist and poet, and macro social worker. Rowan “Crow” Reyes, MSW, CYT is most interested in spaces wherein education, activism, and art intersect. Their overarching mission is to (co)create transformative experiences that simultaneously support individual healing and fuel collective liberation. These experiential containers include community workshops, professional training, 1:1 peer support, and art-based and spiritual circles.
Rowan’s activism was incubated in intersectional feminism, with a strong focus on gender-based violence (partner abuse & sexual violence) prevention. Their current organizing is deeply rooted in queer liberation. In recent years, their work has focused on advocating for queer and trans rights through art, poetry, peer support groups, workshops, education and training.
Rowan believes in queerness as decolonization. They are interested in strategic trouble-making, creative play, harm reduction, radical self-determination, and pleasure as paths to getting free. Rowan believes that community care built outside of institutions is necessary for our collective well-being.
Rowan is personally and politically devoted to trans survival and our inherent right to safety, autonomy, and joy.
