The STOKE Collective
  • home
  • about
    • story of STOKE
    • values and approach
    • who we are
  • what we offer
    • organizational support
    • upcoming webinars and trainings
  • projects
  • contact us
  • donate
  • home
  • about
    • story of STOKE
    • values and approach
    • who we are
  • what we offer
    • organizational support
    • upcoming webinars and trainings
  • projects
  • contact us
  • donate

Who We Are

 
The STOKE Collective, LCA, is currently run by ten collective members, with its work supported and informed by a broad network of communities and co-conspirators.
A yellow and black design with three connected arcs. Around the design are various images. To its right are twelve yellow stars, a red and yellow flame, and a red, a yellow, a blue, and an orange person. Below it is a red square with an arrow to a yellow circle. To its left are grey nodes connected by lines, black shadows of people holding up signs, and three circles - one outlined in a thin black line, one outlined in a thick grey line, one outlined with yellow rays. Across the whole image is a yellow line, as well as grey cloud and yellow squares with words inside of them.

We believe...

That culture shift is real and deep.

In people coming together to understand and transform their worlds.

That the tools we share enable communities to be self-sustaining and adaptable.

That slowness is a powerful and transformative tool in a fast-paced world.

That working with and across difference is vital to the success of meaningful changemaking.​

That solidarity - fighting alongside one another - begins with deep recognition of another’s struggle.

That when we care for one another and are accountable to each other,

we can take bigger risks and fight harder for the long haul.

That when people are truly recognized,

they are more able to fight for themselves and their communities.

That the results of our work unfold over time.

The Collective

Jackie-Brown
Lily Brown
MaryGrace DiMaria
Olivia Espinoza
Kristie Herman
Coqui Negrón
Jishava Patel
Mica-Reel
Jen-Sandler
Téyo Saree

© 2020 by The STOKE Collective, LCA

Graphics by Jordan Bensley, Joanna Chen & Téyo Saree

Newsletter

Jackie Brown

Jackie-Brown

Jackie Brown is a queer educator and activist living in Detroit, MI. She has mobilized around issues such as abolition and decarceration, affordability of higher education, and access for folks with disabilities. Jackie knows bicycles to be a liberatory tool that can dismantle barriers, and is currently focusing on bike education and transportation justice with youth and adults locally. With years of experience and training as a facilitator, she brings spaciousness alongside clear direction and the ability to work through sticky moments gracefully. She has led a wide variety of groups from marginalized folks in the trades to conflict mediators through culture-shifting, visioning, and strategizing processes. In all of her work she relies on her belief in people-power and knows that to win we must center our relationships, build strong structures of support, and both celebrate and reflect on our existing work.

“Jackie is a deeply attuned facilitator who always seems to know what the right question is for a group, when to pivot, and how to slow down and bring everyone along together. She brings clarity, organization, and brightness to her work, and has a way of bringing forward what’s under the surface in gentle ways. To be facilitated by Jackie is to be deeply seen and tended to.”

MaryGrace DiMaria

MaryGrace DiMaria

MaryGrace began her work in movements by organizing in a vast variety of labor sectors (campus dining hall workers, fast food workers, and app based/black car drivers) from 2012-2019. Now, MaryGrace works full time at the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization (CIWO) at Rutgers University as an Innovative Strategies Program Director. Her work at CIWO supports movement leaders, organizations, and academics in trialing out innovative projects & strategies that build worker power. MaryGrace is also a Licensed Social Worker with a speciality in grief and loss. She became a member of The STOKE Collective in 2019 because she finds value in slowing down movement work and grounding in relationships so that our work can sustain itself for the long haul. MaryGrace is based in Hudson County, NJ.

“MaryGrace is a powerhouse-- she brings tenacity, strength, clarity, and a grounding presence to all she does. She does not shy away from the difficult and messy parts of organizing, but leans in and lends a steady guiding hand through them. MaryGrace asks the important questions that push people to show up as their best selves in the work.”

Kristie Herman

Kristie Herman

Kristie Herman is a queer abolitionist, organizer, facilitator, and co-founder of The STOKE Collective. She lives and organizes in so-called Chicago, on Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawotami land. Since entering movement work in 2012, Kristie has worked in a fossil fuel Divestment campaign and broader pipeline resistance, in building community food systems, and in fighting for Mass Pardons alongside family members of the incarcerated and broader racial justice work. With these experiences, Kristie brings a great deal of knowledge around how to develop collective processes and work through conflict transformatively in group settings. Kristie orients to her training and culture shifting work as an organizer first, always seeking to shift power to people– margins in and and bottom up. She brings a skillfulness in the areas of group visioning, strategy making, popular education methodologies and generative conflict. Kristie is passionate about the relationships and community networks that sustain us to stay in movement work for the long haul. She seeks to build movements that reflect the world we are hoping to build– one grounded in values of liberation, autonomy, deep caring community, and self-determination.

“Kristie is a fighter, in the best sense of the word. Driven by a deep commitment to her values, she doesn’t shy away from challenges and is willing to face injustice head-on. Kristie holds herself and those she works with to a high standard, using her facilitation to push people to grow and help people discover their gifts and power.”

Coqui Negrón

Coqui Negrón

Coqui Negrón is a health educator, trainer, interpreter, and community activist. She is a member of different collectives and community organizations in Worcester, Massachusetts that fight for economic, racial and language justice and brings to them her passion for creating welcoming, accessible, and inclusive environments for all. Coqui started her career as a health educator in the HIV field thirty years ago and has had the opportunity to develop curricula for peer education, and care and support programs. She has facilitated trainings locally and internationally on a variety of topics including anti-oppression issues, group facilitation, and sexuality education. As a Reiki Master, Laughter Yoga facilitator and reflexologist, Coqui is committed to making those healing modalities accessible to individuals and communities.

“Coqui creates experiences where people can dream and get honest with each other, while also ensuring there is time for joy and rest. She is thoughtful about not just what a group needs to accomplish its goals, but what people need along the way to maximize their participation - slowing down, reflection, connection, laughter, and so much more.”

Téyo Saree

Téyo Saree

Téyo Saree currently resides in Pueblo/Tiwa territory, so called Albuquerque, and is a many generation desert dweller, with roots and connections to many communities across the country. They come to this work as a creative, artist, facilitator, nepantlere. More specifically, they come to this work with a deep passion for, and orientation to Cultural Organizing: social change work that is rooted in the liberating power of the arts and culture. They bring practices of deep listening and dialogue across difference, collaboration and creative action, and visioning to uplift community self determination. They are guided by visions/values of abolition, transformative justice, community creativity, care work and spiritual grounding in any liberation work they seek to engage with. They have worked in a variety of movement and education spaces, primarily youth organizing, racial and immigration justice, often alongside families and educators. They try to come to this work as honestly as possible, straddling many worlds as a mixed race and gender free human.

“Téyo brings a warm and vibrant energy to their work, shining most when leading groups through visioning and strategizing. A natural coach, Téyo, will stick it out through hardness and create space for deep transformation. They bring deep insights from birth justice, solidarity economies, disability justice, and gender liberatory spaces and find creative ways to infuse this into their work and approach.”

Lily Brown

Lily Brown

Lily Brown (she/her) is a founding member of the STOKE Collective. As a person who has lost and rediscovered a sense of purpose-in-place many times, Lily is deeply grateful to hold space for folks to be in meaningful community with one another. Through her training at the UMass Alliance for Community Transformation (UACT), Lily learned that taking the time to build authentic relationships is critical to effective change work. Over the past ten years, she applied and expanded this orientation into the fields of reproductive justice and sexual health, multi-generational and multiracial community coalitions, and working with teenagers to get the respect they deserve! Outside of her STOKE work, Lily recently relocated from her beloved Worcester, MA and is finding purpose-in-place once again in rural Warwick, MA. This currently looks like a burgeoning excitement for animal tracking, deepening her understanding and commitment to land stewardship and rematriation, and getting more comfortable with the cycles of life and death. She is honing her conflict transformation practices with one rooster in particular…

“Lily has an uncanny ability to connect with people and get them to reflect honestly through insightful questions. She helps groups understand one another better by pulling threads from conversations and presenting information back in an accessible way. When Lily says "what I'm hearing is...", whatever comes next always helps people make important connections or see a situation more clearly.”

Olivia Espinoza

Olivia Espinoza

Olivia Espinoza is a mixed-race facilitator with a decade of experience and is a co-founder of The STOKE Collective. She has guided a wide range of groups, always centering relationships, collectiveness, and care for each other as whole human beings in her work. Olivia is especially energized by working with new or newly restructured groups to create strong foundations for their future work to flourish from. In recent years, she has also built her skills as a conflict transformation practitioner. Outside of facilitation work, Olivia dreams of a world in which people have agency over their own health and reproductive choices. Her work with herbal medicine, expanding access to reproductive care, and work as a doula are all facets of this dream. Olivia currently resides in New Orleans and also considers Cape Cod and Philadelphia her homes.

“Whether facilitating a single meeting or engaging in long term support, Olivia brings a consistent depth of presence, thoughtfulness, and commitment to people's whole beings. She has an incredible ability to keep things moving while still attending to the complexity that arises within groups and people. Whenever she is holding a space I am in, I feel totally welcomed and at ease.”

Jishava Patel

Jishava Patel

Raised by a multi-generational village of people always working multiple jobs, Jishava has seen firsthand the magic of people joining with others, and creating something larger than the sum of their structurally-limited resources. During her time at UMass Amherst, under the mentorship of labor, racial-justice, and feminist organizers, she saw people once again joining together this time using their power to organize for - and win - structural change. All of these experiences gave shape to and strategy. She believes powerful, long-lasting change happens best when people are in joyous and trusting relationship with each other across shared purpose, and we regularly foster each other’s leadership and engagement in organized struggle. Jishava lives in Easthampton, MA, where her village consists of friends, neighbors, her partner, and her mischievous cat, Stirfry.

“Jishava painstakingly takes time to understand the stories and the 'why's' of each person she connects with as a facilitator. She is committed to all members of a group being seen by one another in their complexity each time she steps into a room. As a likely result, Jishava is a conflict transformation extraordinaire that has led multiple groups through seemingly intractable conflicts."

Mica Reel

Mica-Reel

Mica Reel lives on Nipmuc and Pocumtuc land in Northampton, MA and comes to the STOKE Collective with a background in facilitation, organizing in the Climate and Housing Justice movements, mutual aid, and popular education. Most recently, she worked full-time in a rural youth organization facilitating sexual health classes, tending to ongoing mentoring relationships, holding an ongoing space for youth of color, and supporting high school students organizing to shift their school culture. Deeply shaped by the belief that transformation happens in relationship, she spends a lot of time learning and dreaming about where organizing and healing meet, and loves to learn about the connections between shifts on a cellular scale and systems change. In her facilitation work, Mica brings a spacious capacity to hold diverse experiences and truths while using shared values and goals as a compass.

“As a facilitator, Mica embodies curiosity and expansiveness, inviting groups to ask questions, lean into each other, problem-solve, and dream. She gives folks permission to see what rises to the surface when we slow down and listen to their bodies and minds, then guides groups in using that information to act together.”

Jen Sandler, PhD

Jen-Sandler

Since she was a young adult, Jen has been learning how to build worlds where everyone is deeply supported to thrive, find their people, and shape their communities. She has engaged in many projects exploring these possibilities over the past 25+ years, among artists and pushed-out young people, college students and community organizers, young justice activists from communities of color and the mentors and elders they seek, parents/caregivers and the public schools and other social institutions that must be re-formed to engage people’s histories, power, and needs. Jen eventually pursued a PhD to better understand how power and knowledge work in diverse U.S. and Latin American activist landscapes. She has since forged ethnographic and pedagogical partnerships with community organizers and organizations, applied social scientists, family support projects, policy change projects, social movement groups, civic coalitions, and school systems in a dozen cities. Meetings are the main constant across all Jen’s endeavors, and she is fairly obsessed with them as both scholar and creative practitioner. In addition to her role as a member of The STOKE Collective, Jen is Director of UACT, Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at UMass Amherst, a parent, and an engaged community member in Easthampton, MA.

“Time and time again, Jen does whatever it takes to support organizers and change-makers in her orbit. Whether it’s thinking through strategy, grappling with challenging organizational dynamics, or making a food run on the picket line - she offers the real-time and long-term mentorship that sustains our movements.”