Anna Zimmerman (she/her) grew up in south central Pennsylvania and went to Houghton University in Western New York. She is finishing up her degree with a major in Environmental Studies, and a Business Administration minor. Land conservation/restoration or sustainable agriculture are two areas that Anna is considering career-wise.

Anna loves experiencing new places and cultures. Spending half of a semester in Kenya with her college, and completing an Ornithology (study of birds) may term course in Puerto Rico were two of the highlights of her college career. She has a passion for agriculture, which began through a WWOOF (World Wide Opportunity on Organic Farms) stay in Connecticut. In 2023, she completed an internship at a cherry orchard in Michigan, and loved it so much that she went back for the summer of 2024. Michigan is her favorite place, and it will almost certainly come up in conversation from time to time.

She competitively loves playing board games, enjoys picking up her camera and photographing nature, and loves to be around kind and genuine people. She is passionate about mental health, anti-racism, gender and sexuality equality, and the importance of coexistence with all people. Nature is one of the ways that Anna connects with God, and she enjoys camping under the stars, walking along a beach, and going on hikes in the woods. She is looking forward to attending Union Church in Boston, and getting to experience the many things that the area will have to offer.

Anna is excited to be working with Eastie Farms in Boston during this fellowship, and hopes that the experience will guide her as she decides what will come next.

Kateri (she/her) is originally from Portland, Oregon, but moved to Denver, Colorado 7 years ago, and is so excited to make Boston her next home. After graduating from Regis University as a Registered Nurse in 2021, she started working for the past three years as a nurse in an inpatient adolescent crisis stabilization and withdrawal management unit. She learned a lot, but also learned a lot about the systems at play in the inpatient psychiatric environment, and is ready to take a step back from inpatient psychiatry and go back to her roots of community health. Previously she worked with a migrant clinic in the Portland metro area and with a street medicine outreach team in Denver. During her senior year of college, she was part of an intentional living community called Romero House at her Jesuit University and had such an amazing time building community with others who had a passion for social justice and spiritual curiosity. She is looking forward to reentering that environment outside of an academic setting. Along with a passion for mental health, she loves music, going for long walks, traveling to see friends and family across the globe, or cooking and baking to her heart's content! Kateri is pumped to be working with Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center in connection with their racial reconciliation program, and any other things they throw her way!

Luai (he/him) grew up in Ramallah, Palestine where he attended the Ramallah Friends School. He later studied at Tufts University and graduated with a double degree in Chemistry and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Throughout his College years, Luai became very active in community organizing at Tufts and beyond in the Greater Boston area. During his time there, he undertook leadership positions in student organizations like Taqadum, the Tufts Labor Coalition, and the indigenous students' organization at tufts. He is passionate about Indigenous land rematriation, decolonization, and transnational third-world feminisms. Luai hopes that his time at QVS will help establish a career in the international NGO/ non-profit sector where he will focus his efforts on humanitarian action. Luai is excited to join the Material Aid and Advocacy Program for his QVS placement!

Michael Lozada is in the process of discovering how career can intersect with a driving force of helping people, something he got a taste of working for a community kitchen project at his alma mater, Grinnell College. With an academic interest in people with all sorts of different perspectives, he graduated with degrees in Psychology and Chinese, helping grow the Chinese program there through shared meals and cooking. Besides academics, he enjoyed performing improv and singing in choir while at college and hopes to continue these activities in Boston. Michael grew up attending North Carolina Yearly Meeting (Conservative) through his home meeting, Davidson Friends Meeting. Whatever working at Mass Bail Fund brings, Michael knows it give him the growth he needs while, most importantly, aiding those in his community.

Eastie Farm is a grassroots climate and food justice organization. Our work is deeply community-based, focused on context-based climate solutions for a better today and tomorrow. We operate 7 urban farm sites, including a geothermal greenhouse. We farm, we operate a CSA (fresh produce box), run K-12 climate literacy programs, and lead a youth green job program. The Eastie Farm Fellow supports one or more of these programs! The specific role would be dependent on the Fellows interests and skills, and how they align with Eastie Farm’s needs as an organization. Past fellows have straddled multiple programs, for example, working part-time in our greenhouse taking care of plants and working part time as a climate educator in our school gardens. Other fellows have honed their graphic design and tech skills for our website and organizational communication, while also helping to plan community events. Our community is housed in a minority-majority, mostly LatinX, Environmental Justice community.

Our Values:

• We believe in intergenerational people power. We know that the source of our power is the grassroots, and the only way we can win a livable future for all is if we build a social movement strong enough to overpower the most profitable and influential companies the world has ever seen. And we know that we can best tackle this multi-generational challenge if we engage multi-generational leadership. When we combine the passion, perspective, and energy of our youth leaders with the wisdom, connections, and experience of our community leaders, we have a winning formula for change.
• We believe in partnerships. We know that we are not in this fight alone and cannot win this fight alone. We seek to build powerful coalitions of climate groups and other progressive organizations that collectively work toward common goals related to climate, jobs, and justice. This ultimately will build a broader network of relationships and support for our climate and clean energy priorities, and advance the goals of justice and equity that are essential to lasting democratic change.
• We believe in equity and justice. We know that climate change is an issue that intersects with ecological, social, racial, economic, indigenous, and immigrant justice. As we seek to address climate change and the impacts of fossil fuels, we seek to advance equity and justice in our campaigns and in our internal operations and show up in solidarity for these other movements’ priorities as our capacity allows.
• We believe in science. We know that there are people who have dedicated their careers to studying the impacts of climate pollution, and we think that policies that address pollution reduction and advance clean energy should be driven by our best understanding of the latest climate science. We also believe it is our responsibility to speak to, and advocate for, policies and goals based on this science, whether or not such actions are seen as politically realistic in the short-term. We are also committed to transparency when, in the interest of setting a precedent or achieving an interim victory, we support bills or policies that fall short of these standards.

Position Description:

The Communications Fellow will be responsible for managing public communications for the Better Future Project across our three programs--350 Mass--a volunteer driven climate action network, CREW--Communities Responding to Extreme Weather--which supports a network of climate resilience hubs (mostly libraries and houses of worship), and Make Polluters Pay--a campaign aimed at holding the largest fossil fuel companies financially accountable for the damages caused by climate change. The Communications fellow will work with our program staff to execute communications to our bases of volunteers through email newsletters, and the broader public through social media. Through this role the fellow will have an opportunity to engage in various aspects of the campaign work--from community outreach events, to direct actions. The fellow will also contribute to our grassroots fundraising efforts but supporting giving drives throughout the year.

The Massachusetts Bail Fund (MBF) is a nonprofit, abolitionist organization with a short-term goal of paying bail for people in Massachusetts who are incarcerated and/or being held in pre-trial detention. MBF's long-term goal is to assist in the movement and completion of abolishing jails, prisons, policing, and supervision which reproduces racism, gender oppression and queer antagonism, ableism, xenophobia, ageism, and religious oppression. MBF envisions a world without prisons, policing, and other institutional forces of harm, exploitation, and marginalization. Part of this vision involves centralizing the leadership of, and amplifying the voices of, those who have been directly and most heavily impacted by the carceral system. MBF was founded in 2011 as a small group of activists following the Occupy Boston movement who posted bail for folks in Suffolk County up, which then grew over the next several years to be comprised of approximately 30 consistent volunteers and a board of directors by 2016. MBF gained community-based and financial momentum in the next three years after extensive networking and political education campaigns (i.e., when the organization was posting bail statewide in thirteen counties), and again in 2020 following the murder of George Floyd and the acceleration of the Black Lives Matter movement. MBF is now comprised of four staff (i.e., executive director, two bail organizers, bookkeeper), approximately 25 volunteers in a rotation, and a board of directors (i.e., six individuals). MBF posts bail up to $1,000 for an individual without regard to the nature of their case or prior legal involvement as it is a non-judgmental bail fund.

Fellow Position Description: Mass Bail Fund Fellow

MBF’s operational structure is evolving in a direction of having leadership and decision-making are centralized in people with direct experience with the carceral system. The Fellow will not be working directly with clients (i.e., formerly incarcerated people), but must consider the reality of the disproportionate treatment of those impacted by the judicial and carceral systems, including people of Color as well as genderqueer and gender-nonconforming people, and disabled people. The Fellow will get to meet, work with, and build rapport with staff impacted by this system and with community partners. They will get to contribute to the team’s vision through building avenues to more effective recordkeeping, reporting, and material development for political and community education campaigns. This will require strong writing and verbal skills, experience with Google suite, a passion for advocating for social justice, and adaptability to new responsibilities, all with the support of the MBF team. They will also assist in contributing to the creation of sustainable practices within MBF’s operations. The Fellow will have an opportunity to make a tremendous difference in the efficiency of freeing people from incarceration so that those people may fight their cases and have access to the resources they need in a supportive environment.

South Jamaica Plain Health Center- Health Promotion Center The Health Promotion Center (HPC) is a part of the Southern Jamaica Plain Health Center. Our mission is to provide personal, quality health care with respect and compassion to our diverse community.
The HPC uses the lens of Health Equity and Social Justice and takes an approach that considers social determinants of health/strives to be anti-racist through its programming and campaign work.

The Racial Reconciliation Project: Our vision is to build a movement of radical and structural thinkers. From this movement will emerge a core of racial justice practitioners that will be devoted to collective liberation and undoing the trauma that racism has caused.
Our mission is to guide youth to reach amazing levels of connection with the self, with their peers, and then ultimately with the world. In this, we aim to provide tools to help youth understand intersectionality and how the history of racism and white supremacy has shaped the current policies and practices in the US, manage and lower their stress levels, regulate their emotions, and understand their role in dismantling racism.

More than 12,000 patients in Jamaica Plain and surrounding communities make over 50,000 visits each year to the health center. Over 50% of our patients are Latino and our bilingual staff provide patients with high quality primary care. As part of BWH and Partners HealthCare, patients benefit from receiving care in a familiar, local setting while being part of a large, integrated network of specialty and hospital care that provides any medical services they might need.

With the opening of the SJPHC Health Promotion Center in 2010, the health center was able to move beyond medical care alone. Doctors and mental health providers can prescribe support groups, yoga classes, or many other activities with a specific focus that will address the patient's health needs. And we're thinking about the health of the community, working together to address the health equity, social and racial justice, and structures and policies that affect the health of all of us.

Fellow-
Work with a team of interns and staff to coordinate a variety of health promotion racial justice and equity projects. Fellow will support diabetes management groups, physical activity opportunities, and youth engagement; help evaluate and track progress and assist with grant reporting and other documentation; participate in community meetings and organizing projects related to transit and food justice; support youth programming at the south street youth center and with the Racial Reconciliation and Healing project www.racialrec.org. To learn more about SJPHC’s racial justice approach please view this video: https://vimeo.com/268050238

Fellow will receive training on the history of racism and white supremacy in medicine and beyond, the current impact of racism on health, racial justice framing and communication and how to apply Critical Race Theory to research and other projects. This is multi-racial, multi-identity work and all are encouraged to apply and bring their systems analysis.