People

Director

Abby Reyes

Abby Reyes directs the UCI Community Resilience Projects in the Office of Sustainability at the University of California, Irvine. Read more.

2021-23 Visiting Community Scholar

Shirleen Achieng

As a Visiting Community Scholar in February 2020, Rosa will share Facilitating Power’s Spectrum of Community Engagement to Community Ownership. The purpose of the visit is to advance various collaborations that involve UCI Community Resilience Projects on and off campus. While here, Rosa will work with students, faculty, staff, and community collaborators affiliated with UCI Community Resilience Projects; Sustainability Resource Center; Student Housing; academic units such as Public Health, Chicano/Latino Studies, Urban Planning, and Law; and several community organizations external to the University.

Rosa González is a senior fellow at the Movement Strategy Center and the founder of Facilitating Power, a consultancy designed to cultivate, through deep partnership, the practice & pedagogy of a living democracy. Read more.

2022-23 Learning and Evaluation Specialist

Adriana Aldana

Adriana Aldana

Adriana Aldana (she/ella) is the Learning and Evaluation Specialist for UCI Community Resilience Projects (AY 2022-23). Read more.

Lead Training Partner

Aryeh Shell

Aryeh Shell is the Lead Training Partner with UCI Community Resilience Projects. During 2018-19, Aryeh co-designed and facilitated the statewide trainers’ training for UC and CSU faculty and staff for Level I of the Student Leadership Institute for Climate Resilience. During 2019-20, Aryeh co-designed the curriculum for CooperAccion: an Introductory Course on Worker Co-operatives and is leading the curriculum design team for Level III of the Student Leadership Institute for Climate Resilience.

Aryeh Shell is the Lead Training Partner with UCI Community Resilience Projects. Read more.

Project Manager

Mextli Lopez

Mextli Lopez

Mextli Lopez (she/her) is a resident of Santa Ana who is actively engaged in local movements to reclaim the humanity of immigrant working class people of color and their right to live in a dignified way. In her professional work she has spent the last four years serving undocumented college students as a mentor, advocate, and student support specialist. 

Current Student Fellows

 

Campus and Community Collaborators

Academic Year 2021-22 Faculty Advisory Group

Sameer Ashar

Sameer M. Ashar is Clinical Professor at the School of Law at the University of California, Irvine and co-director of the UC Irvine Immigrant Rights Clinic. Read more.

Kaaryn Gustafson

Professor Gustafson’s research and scholarship is interdisciplinary and explores the role of law in remedying inequality—and in reinforcing inequality. Read more.

Alana LeBrón

Alana LeBrón, Ph.D., M.S., is an Assistant Professor of Public Health and Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Read more.

Valerie Olson

Valerie Olson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. Read more.

S. Ama Wray

Dr. S. Ama Wray is the creator of Embodiology®, is a new sensi-cognitive movement practice that combines individual expression, body-mind dexterity and community building, together in an experience that is joyous, insightful and vitalizing. Read more.

UCI

Salvador Zarate

Project Affiliates

S Forbath

Susie is the Administrator for the UCI Office of Sustainability. Read more.

UCI

Jennifer Otero

Past fellows, Staff, Affiliates, and Faculty Advisors

Udara Abeysekera

Udara serves as Program Coordinator for the UC Irvine Sustainability Resource Center (SRC), planning and delivering programs and resources that unleash youth leadership for community resilience to a changing climate and cultivate a campus culture of sustainability. Read more.

Shirleen Achieng

She currently serves as the Global Climate Leadership Council (GCLC) and the UC Sustainability Steering Committee (UCSSC) student rep. Within the GCLC she is responsible for advising the University on achieving their goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2025 and other sustainability goals. As a part of the UCSSC, she is responsible for oversight of the systemwide Sustainable Practices Policy. Additionally, she will serve as a Carbon Neutrality Initiative (CNI) fellow. Her goals within these roles are to examine the intersecting environmental, social justice, and racial crises that are occurring in contemporary society and how they affect the UC sustainability practices.

Shirleen is a fourth year public health science major at UCI. Read more.

Temitope Aladetimi

Description: At UCI, we understand that transformations in physical infrastructure alone will not suffice to achieve the University of California’s climate and sustainability goals. How we build the human infrastructure to get us there is also key. “Community resilience” describes our efforts to create human infrastructure through which climate and sustainability solutions foster and reflect social cohesion and inclusion of diverse voices in our university community and beyond. Through Community Resilience Projects, we seek to understand, engage, and lift up the interests, contributions, and leadership of underrepresented communities on our campus and in communities in our region that are more vulnerable to the impacts of the changing climate–typically low-income communities, people of color, indigenous communities, immigrants, and elderly populations.

Student Project: The Climate Ambassador worked with the UCI Community Resilience Project to integrate and align UCI’s sustainability and climate activities with UCI’s wide ranging activities that forward understanding and progress on racial and social justice.  The fellow also worked more generally with UCI’s Office of Sustainability and Office of Environmental Planning and Sustainability to communicate about campus and UC system-wide sustainability goals and programs, to assess existing programs, and to empower students to engage in and shape those efforts. In addition, the fellow was expected to help shape and participate in a UC system-wide dialogue and mobilization among fellows regarding climate action, a process facilitated and overseen by the student representatives to the UC President’s Global Climate Leadership Council, who convene regular meetings with fellows from all campuses.

Tope is a fourth year Criminology Law & Society major and International Studies minor at UC Irvine. Read more.

Bo Daraphant

Based at the Cross-Cultural Center, Bo became a fellow in April 2017. Project activities include catalyzing a rich campus conversation, fostering alignment, and building campus momentum to address actively the root causes of environmental, social, and racial injustice. The Fellow supported co-lab participants in designing and carrying out a range of actions that build community resilience, including mobilizing student capacity to reclaim and create systems and cultures of collective action that lift up cultural relationships to the earth and land. This fellowship was a hands-on, experiential learning opportunity to develop and practice a range of skills essential to building community resilience in the context of furthering our campus’s climate and sustainability goals.

 Bo Daraphant is a third year student studying International Studies at UCI. Read more.

Seth Davis

Prof. Seth Davis is an expert on federal litigation and public administration. Read more.

Javier Garay

Javier Garay was born and raised in Bell Gardens, California. Javier is currently a third year Environmental Science Major. Read more.

Navjyot (Navi) Gill

Navjyot will work with UCI Community Resilience Projects to integrate and align UCI’s sustainability and climate activities with UCI’s wide-ranging activities that forward understanding and progress on racial and social justice. This work will include coordination of and involvement in UCI’s Community Resilience Co-Lab. The selected fellow will work with supervisors from the Co-lab to plan AY 18-19 fellowship activities to continue to weave together students, faculty, and staff working at the intersection of these issues.

Navjyot Gill is a second-year PhD student in the Criminology, Law and Society department at UC Irvine and a Eugene Cota-Robles Fellow. Read more.

Shirleen Achieng
Neda works to integrate and align UCI’s sustainability and climate activities with UCI’s wide-ranging activities that forward understanding and progress on racial and social justice. She supports the UC-wide efforts to integrate social equity into the work of the UC Sustainability Steering Committee and the UC President’s Global Climate Leadership Council. At UCI, this work includes involvement in UCI’s Community Resilience Co-Lab. The student-led Co-lab aims to build a stronger campus community response to the enduring and intersecting crises of environmental, racial, and social injustice. It brings together UCI graduate and undergraduate students, faculty, and staff from across disciplines and departments to co-generate critical and collaborative shared space for community, experimentation, skills-sharing, and action. Neda works with staff and faculty mentors from the Co-lab to plan and carry out AY 19-20 fellowship activities to continue to weave together students, faculty, and staff working at the intersection of these issues.

Neda Ibrahim is a second-year student at UCI working toward a Biological sciences degree with an emphasis in ecology. Read more.

Esmeralda Hic

Esme is working as a Community Resilience Projects Fellow. She will be working alongside community leaders in Santa Ana on existing projects including Cooperacion Santa Ana and a youth-led investigation on lead soil levels in the community.

Esmeralda Hic is a fourth year, first generation college student at UCI. Read more.

noemi linares-ramirez

Noemi Linares-Ramirez is a Latina-Navajo Ph.D. student studying Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Read more.

gregory lopez

Gregory Lopez is a Project Manager with UCI Community Resilience Projects. Read more.

Adonia Lugo

Dr. Adonia Lugo is an anthropologist who studies our mobility experiences and expectations and an activist working toward inclusive and equitable sustainability. Read more.

Connie McGuire

Connie McGuire, PhD, is currently a Specialist with UCI’s Community Resilience Projects and Department of Family Medicine and Director of Community Relationships with the Newkirk Center for Science & Society, where she works on community engagement projects in a variety of settings from sustainability education evaluation to quality of care improvement programs for patients with Alzheimer’s Disease and their caregivers. Read more.

Rachel Pennington

Rachel Pennington is a recent University of California, Irvine graduate serving as the Coordinator of the Global Sustainability Resource Center (GSRC). Read more.

Emanuel Preciado

The purpose of Manny’s summer fellowship was to support the CRECE cooperative in Santa Ana, CA and enhance collaboration between the UCI Community Resilience Projects and CRECE who share similar values and objectives rooted in social and environmental justice. The community partnership forged between UCI Community Resilience Projects and CRECE cooperative was based on reciprocity and the shared understanding that the problems of climate change, racism and all social injustice, economic inequality, and our challenged democracy are connected, and so are the solutions. Manny assisted as an urban farmer working hands-on at the CRECE microfarm, drafting narratives for the organization, joining meetings, and conducting research.

Manny is a 2nd year Ph.D. student in Urban Planning and Policy focused on community-driven planning, urban sociology, social movements, and community-based research. Read more.

Mojgan Sami

Dr. Mojgan Sami, PhD, has worked on socially and environmentally sustainable planning, public policy, and research in partnership with both community and intergovernmental organizations for over 20 years. Read more.

Kim Serrano

Kimberly Serrano is the coordinator of Community Resilience Projects specializing in data analysis, geographic information systems, and community engagement. Read more.

Kristina Shull

Kristina Shull received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of California, Irvine Department of History and currently serves as a lecturer. Read more.

Ambereen Siddiqui

In collaboration with the Sustainability Resource Center, CooperAcción Santa Ana, and CRECE Cooperativa, Ambereen is working with UCI Community Resilience Projects to research market conditions for new co-ops in Orange County and assist with weekly workshops that emphasize community ownership and economic justice.

Ambereen Siddiqui is a first year PhD student at UCI. Read more.
Sabrina Strings

Sabrina Strings, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine. Read more.

Karen Valladares

Co-developed a Photovoice curriculum to effectively open up a dialogue about environmental concerns from the perspective of the youth in Santa Ana who are disproportionately affected by environmental justice issues

Karen Valladares is a fourth-year first-generation undergraduate student majoring in Public Health Policy. Read more.

Sarah Vann

Sarah Vann

Sarah is a 4th year Psychology major undergraduate at UCI. She helps manage the Community Resilience Projects website, social media, and communications.

Geoff Ward

Geoff Ward’s research examines socio-historical relationships between race, crime and justice, including evolving dynamics of racial violence, conflict, and inequality; racial politics of youth justice; and social movement, labor, and policy efforts to advance racial justice. Read more.

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard is Associate Professor of African American Studies, a Faculty affiliate of Gender and Sexual Studies as well as Queer Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Read more.