As the 2020-23 Board President, I couldn’t be more excited about our organization’s work today. To build the future that contains mutual respect and opportunities for a wide spectrum of identities, we must do the work here and now. There will always be a need to imagine new realities, to tweak things that may be good for some to be better for all.
I have watched in awe and actively participated in the creation of a nurturing learning environment where folks have challenged themselves to new ideas, extended networks, and fresh perspectives-all with space to make mistakes or show up less than perfect. I live a much fuller life as a creative being because of my civic involvement in the place I call home and I have worked with and within our organization in a variety of roles over the last four years. I have learned it takes responsibility, ownership, compassion, consideration and love to actively build and maintain the spaces we want to see in our local communities. I say this again and again, this organization has given me a platform to explore community organizing beyond the realm of a single industry or a boxed in cultural narrative. After transformative years for our organization, I am enlivened by our ability to reemerge as something new and better rooted in our reality, but still with ample room to grow and change with our members and collaborators. Throughout my career I have dedicated myself to working collectively with organizations and putting in the work necessary to make that happen-whether it be creatively, logistically or otherwise.
As an artist and community organizer born and raised in Austin, my ambition is for future generations of Texans and Tejanxs to experience more joyous, creative lives. ‘As critics of utopian thinking have long regarded, the futures we imagine reveal the biases of the present it seems entirely possible that imagining different futures and temporalities might help us see, and do, the present differently,’ says Alison Kafer, PhD, a Disabilities Studies scholar and Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UT Austin.
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