About One Square World
One Square World (1SW) is a non-profit organization dedicated to creating liberatory systems for racial and environmental justice.
We create pathways to place-based collaboration between diverse stakeholders, building a shared vision and action toward equity and sustainability.
THE ORIGIN
“The idea for One Square World came at a time in my life when I was feeling isolated and disconnected from my community and trying to find my space as a young queer latine professional in a field that siloes environment, community, and justice, and perpetuates one-size-fits all ideas of what it means to build thriving communities. It felt deeply strange not to be able to locate myself within my own community network. On a walk one day, I noticed that not only was I not in relationship with my neighbors, I couldn’t name the types of trees that I passed everyday. I felt little agency in decisions made in my neighborhood.
At the same time, I was traveling frequently to Haiti to support recovery efforts after the 2010 earthquake and learned intimately that the most effective recovery efforts were in communities with deep ties. When recovery efforts worked with and took direct direction from communities, people thrived. However, most international efforts often break apart existing community networks by militarizing their operations, swooping in and taking over decision-making, then swooping back out and leaving communities with even more to rebuild.
We know that people are invested in their own communities and are the most impacted by whatever happens there. When we incorporated One Square World in 2014, alongside former board member Cyndy Carlson, we wanted to support community members to have the power to shape their realities. To do that, we need to understand deeply the places that we live in and the systems that overlap and impact those places: natural, economic, and social systems.”
The name started with the idea that we were going to build with the people that were doing work within their one square mile of their home or their community. People that were invested in their ‘place’. The one square mile or one square kilometer in many cases is people’s immediate reality. That’s your world, right? A one square world. And to engage in that world, it’s important to understand all the systems that happen there and to own your participation in that one square world. Then, we had this idea of many different ones square worlds coming together.”
Andrea Atkinson, Executive Director
OUR MISSION
One Square World (1SW) builds with communities historically targeted by systemic oppression to transform structures of power.
We design and facilitate group processes and trainings that center Black, Indigenous and People of Color as core stakeholders and decision-makers, leading the creation and implementation of policies and systems that are equitable, regenerative, and build liberating, healthy, and prosperous lives and futures.
Photo by Zackary Drucker, The Gender Spectrum Collection
THE TEAM
Photo by One Square World
Brandy Brooks
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Brandy Brooks (she/her) is an Afro-Latina organizer, educator, facilitator, and designer who has spent more than 15 years working on social and environmental justice. She focuses on community organizing and power-building; community-based design and land use planning; and food justice and food sovereignty. She was the founding executive director of the Community Design Resource Center of Boston and has worked in senior management roles with the Rudy Bruner Foundation (Cambridge, MA), The Food Project (Boston, MA), the Boston Collaborative for Food and Fitness, and Dreaming Out Loud (Washington, DC). Throughout Brandy’s career, she has been committed to supporting the right to self-determination for urban communities of color and communities with low income levels, by advocating for equitable representation, meaningful participation, and community-led decision-making on projects and policies that affect community members’ lives. Brandy is able to converse and read in both English and Spanish. She served as Co-Director of One Square World alongside Andrea Atkinson for several years and is now part of the Board of Directors.
Photo by Erin X. Smithers
Vatic Tayari Kuumba
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Vatic Tayari Kuumba (he/him) uses art as an essential tool for policy design, civic engagement, and popular education. Vatic is an educator, performing artist, and a father of three children. He is a live performance instructor and part of the Racial Justice Initiative at AS220, an arts nonprofit and creative incubator in Providence, RI. Vatic completed a Live Arts Residency at AS220 where he created his first theatrical production, A Furtive Movement, in 2017. He is the recipient of the 2018 RISCA Fellowship for Theater and the 2017 RISCA Playwright Merit Fellowship 2017. And was also Artist-in-Residence for the State Association of Arts Agencies in 2019. Most recently, Kuumba collaborated on the creation of the City of Providence’s Climate Justice Plan and the Environmental Racism Resolution passed by Providence City Council in 2020, as part of the Racial and Environmental Justice Committee in Providence. In 2021 Vatic was a recipient of the EPA’s Environmental Merit Award. Vatic is also co-director and lead writer for MoralDocs, an abolitionist transmedia project and virtual reality film.
Photo by Silver Santos
Juliana Santoyo
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Juliana Santoyo (they/them/elle) is a mixed, nonbinary femme who walks the red road, born amongst the sacred mountains and rivers of the Northern Andes Mountains located in so-called Colombia. They are bilingual, being fluent in both English and Spanish. A deep feeler, lover, and systems thinker, their path has involved serving community as a 10+ year public school educator & liberatory facilitator, healing artist, restorative justice practitioner, and certified Life, Leadership, and Executive Coach. Juli’s work draws from a combination of ancestral healing practices, liberatory facilitation, and emergent systems design. In 2016 they founded a Contemplative Peacebuilding program for ex-combatants reintegrating from armed conflict in Colombia, working to explore the personal, interpersonal and systemic practices and policies needed to cultivate peace and liberation on a collective level. Drawing on these same life-fueling explorations, Juli also co-founded the Black Lotus Collective, a contemplative arts healing space for QTBIPOC across Turtle Island. They hold onto the deep belief (and practice) that our bodies are our roadmaps to liberation, serving as compasses for alignment with our wiser selves, with those parts of us that are of this land, connected to the magic and wisdom of our ancestors, the elements, and all of our relations.
Shey Rivera Ríos
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Shey Rivera Ríos (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and builder of structures for artists, culture bearers, and movement workers. Rivera has 15 years of experience in the nonprofit arts sector, using arts and culture to serve community development and racial equity goals. Before 1SW, Rivera served as Director of Inclusive Regional Development at MIT CoLab, Dept of Urban Studies and Planning MIT, and previous to that, was Artistic/Co-Director of AS220, a renowned arts organization and creative incubator in Providence, RI. Rivera has an MA in Global Arts and Cultures from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BA in Psychology and Sociology from the University of Puerto Rico (UPR-Rio Piedras). Rivera is committed to art as a catalyst for social change and honoring community stories and lived experience as the knowledge that can help us craft more just and sustainable futures.
Photo by Kannetha Brown
Tarik Bartel
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Tarik Bartel (they/them) is a Thai-American artist, community organizer, and educator whose work is rooted in creating spaces for collective joy and imagination. Tarik has supported the design and facilitation of youth-centered leadership programs in the Greater Boston area since 2014. They are a photographer, poet, and visual storyteller.
In 2016, Tarik co-founded Boston-based art collective ANGRY ASIAN GIRLS. Since then, Tarik has designed youth-centered creative programming with Pao Arts Center, Castle Square Tenants Organization, the City of Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, ICA Boston, and Roxbury Youth Programs.
Tarik's lifework is informed by the belief that art centered in community healing can leverage social change and connect us more deeply to one another. They hope to pour into others what has been poured into them.
On a warm day, you can find Tarik digging in the garden with their two pups.
Photo provided by Lily Xie
Lily Xie
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Lily Xie (she/her) is a Chinese-American artist, educator, and cultural strategist. In collaboration with grassroots organizers and BIPOC residents, she facilitates creative projects with a focus on public space, housing, and racial justice. Lily's work is grounded in Boston's Chinatown neighborhood, where she previously worked as the Community Programs Manager with Asian Community Development Corporation, and as an artist collaborating with community organizers through the mediums of animation and print media. In 2022, Lily was selected as an Artist-In-Residence with the City of Boston; previously, she was a member of the inaugural cohort of Radical Imagination for Racial Justice, and has been awarded grants for her collaborations and solo work from The Boston Foundation, New England Foundation for the Arts, and MIT's Transmedia Storytelling Initiative. Lily also brings her experience in research and data science, as a former researcher at MIT's Community Innovators Lab (CoLab), Data + Feminism Lab, and Center for Constructive Communication. She has a Masters in City Planning from MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning, where her research focused on the intersection between art, repair, and spatial justice.
Photo by One Square World
Andrea Atkinson
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Andrea Atkinson (she/her) is a Latinx facilitator and Just Policy designer working at the intersection of our environment and liberation from oppressive systems. Andrea’s global experience extends from the US, to Haiti, to Bolivia and beyond. She has facilitated diverse constituents - always centering the leadership of grassroots, BIPOC community members - in leadership development, education, policy development and other action around racial, social, economic and environmental issues facing communities at the local and global scale. She has co-facilitated processes such as the Climate Justice Plan in Providence, RI with the Racial and Environmental Justice Committee; Climate Justice Alliance Energy Democracy Working Group, leadership and staff processes; Barr Foundation’s DEI philanthropic strategy, the development of Green Justice Zones in Providence, Rhode Island with Racial and Environmental Justice Committee, and the development of an equitable Building Emissions Performance Standard in Boston with Alternatives for Community and Environment. Andrea is bilingual, fluent in both English and Spanish.
Team Member Qualifications
We are local leaders in our respective communities in New England, demonstrating our connection and ability to represent and engage with communities on the ground. We are culture bearers, artists, designers, facilitators, community organizers, educators, project leaders and organizational administrators. Together, our collective knowledge and experience is multi-faceted, deep, rich, and expansive. Our team is also comprised of members who are fluent in Spanish
Facilitators have been trained on 1) Just Transition Framework, 2) Community Engagement to Ownership Spectrum, a collaborative governance model that we use in our work, described here by the Movement Strategy Center, and 3) Undoing Racism through The People's Institute for Survival and Beyond.
We are also a part of the National Association of Climate Resilience Planners.
Interested in working with us? View our Job Openings:
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Alexandra Garita
Treasurer, Board of Directors
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Alexandra Garita is a proud feminist, lesbian, mother and activist for gender, economic and environmental justice. She was born and raised in Mexico. Garita is the Executive Director of Prospera International Network of Women’s Funds, which is committed to resourcing women, girls, and trans people’s organizations, activists, movements, and their communities around the world. Alex has served in senior leadership in various Mexican feminist organizations. She was the founder and first executive coordinator of Realizing Sexual and Reproductive Justice (RESURJ) for five years. She previously led the international policy work at the International Women's Health Coalition and the International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region in New York. Prior to that, she worked in Mexico with Article XIX, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations. She is an Editorial Board Member of Reproductive Health Matters and holds a B.A. in International Relations from Boston University and a Master of Arts in the Theory and Practice of Human Rights from the University of Essex.
Linked In: Alexandra Garita
Jayson Maurice Porter
Board Chair, Board of Directors
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Dr. Jayson Maurice Porter (Ph.D., Northwestern 2022) was born in Maryland like his great-grandmother Winona Christina Spencer Lee (1909-2012), who worked family farm land on the Eastern Shore until the early 2000s. He is an environmental historian of Latin America and Black Environmental History at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research specializes in environmental justice and politics, science and technology studies, food systems, agrochemicals, and racial ecologies in Mexico and the Americas. He is also an editorial board member of the North American Congress for Latin America (NACLA) and Plant Perspectives: An Interdisciplinary Journal. You can read his work in the Washington Post, Distillations, the Organic Center, Environmental Humanities, and more. Outside of academia, he loves to connect with other black environmental educators, write creative non-fiction stories, and design environmental-literacy curricula for broader audiences of all ages. He most recently co-designed and co-facilitate the Environmental Justice Freedom School with the Chicago Teachers Union in June 2023.
Erin Coates-Connor
Secretary, Board of Directors
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Erin is a queer scientist, nature enthusiast, data nerd, and pleasure activist. As a systems thinker and experimenter, Erin thrives on understanding the intricate threads that connect systems, and is always seeking to translate ideas into actionable plans. She has a particular interest in ecological restoration and its intersections with environmental justice and community engagement with citizen science. Erin holds a BA in Environmental Studies and Sustainable Development from Mount Holyoke College, as well as a MSc in Environmental Conservation from UMass Amherst, where she studied the effectiveness of different management approaches on controlling invasive plant species and restoring native species diversity. Currently in her work life, she channels her analytical skills as a Health and Safety Analyst in the construction industry. Erin has previously worked as an Admin and Research Assistant in energy-efficiency program evaluation with consulting firm NMR Group. Based in the coastal town of Ipswich, Massachusetts, Erin is a member of the town's Open Space Committee where she advocates for increasing access to open space lands. She maintains a deep connection with nature, and can often be found exploring beaches, hiking forested trails, and paddling along the riverbanks. Erin is also deeply committed to fostering sexually liberated cultures and creating environments for healing from sexual trauma. Through this work, she holds spaces for people to explore embodied senses of liberation and pleasure, empowering them to seek their own paths to safety and power in intimate relationships.
