OUR TEAM
RIC STAFF
Maya
Maya is a proud and loud RIC alum weaving organizational development and operations skills with a deeply personal anti-colonial environmental pedagogy. Maya is also an alum of RIC member org FoodWhat?! and former Education Director at member org Panting Justice. Presently Maya is the Curriculum and Evaluation Manager with Mycelium Youth Network advancing an intergenerational model for organizations to assert, develop and practice a values aligned evaluation and research identity.
We are guided by an intergenerational advisory body of organizers, land stewards, artists, educators, growers, and cultural workers. Their experience is shaped by identity, community history, and movement lineage - grounded in youth organizing, food and land justice, and climate resilience.
Our advisors reflect a tapestry of lived experience and cultural traditions, making this leadership body both strategic and deeply multidimensional.
Meet the RIC Advisory Members
Ayisah Yusuf
An Afro-Indigenous organizer in Washington, D.C., Aiyisah helped launch RIC’s Youth Food Justice Zine in 2015 and remains a core movement steward. She is a water protector with Honoring Our Sacred Waters and supports community events and water ceremonies with the Patuxent Riverkeeper team.
Travis McKenzie
A Chicano educator and longtime food justice organizer from New Mexico, Travis co-founded Project Feed the Hood and continues to reconnect youth to land, culture, and community. He teaches at Polk Middle School and organizes with the Southwest Organizing Project.
Irene Juárez O’Connell
A Xicana visual artist and cultural worker, Irene centers healing, stories, and tradition in youth work. She is the Executive Director of FoodWhat?! in Santa Cruz, CA, where she cultivates belonging, resilience, and leadership with young people through land, culture, and art.
Iyeshima Harris
Born in Jamaica, Iyeshima is a longtime advocate for community greenspaces, free school lunch, and youth-driven food justice. She is Interim Executive Director at Green Guerillas and Black Land Stewardship Coordinator with Northeast Farmers of Color Land Trust, grounding her work in liberation and land-based care.
Paw Paw Wei
Born in Burma and raised in a Thai refugee camp, Paw Paw is rooted in refugee-led food sovereignty. She joined Transplanting Traditions Community Farm as a youth and now supports refugee growers through business development and community organizing in North Carolina.
Kailyne Sarmiento
An urban land steward from San Francisco, Kailynes leads youth programs and grows food and medicine through Hummingbird Farm. Her work weaves intergenerational solidarity, ancestral knowledge, and community wellness - grounded in storytelling, plants, and place-based organizing.