Evonnia

BIOGRAPHY

Upon starting her PhD program, Evonnia simultaneously joined a local economic justice grassroots organization and began working with a range of campus leaders to increase student participation in campus decision-making processes. She worked on issue and legislative campaigns with the grassroots organization like those to protect and expand social security and Medicaid, raise the minimum wage, address student loan debt, and gain environmental protections. On campus, she cofounded several groups and organizations and assisted in laying the groundwork for and launching what would become the graduate employee union. She subsequently began working remotely for a startup organization on issues like increasing birth control and abortion access, addressing Black maternal and infant mortality rates, and ending HIV criminalization. Working in coalitions or collaboratively over the years have strengthened her resolve to continue combining her talents as an educator, researcher, and community organizer to inform and guide her movement building work.

A major component of Evonnia’s integral approach is the belief that education must be an ongoing practice for anyone engaging in movement work. Another is that research should inform and support movement strategies. Also, the development and implementation of strategies and tactics should correspond with how social justice issues intersect, why they must be simultaneously addressed, and how adequately addressing them requires both systemic and interpersonal solutions derived from and continually evaluated by those most directly affected. She has learned through years of recruitment and mobilization that developing new leaders, holding each other accountable, learning political histories, managing varying personalities, and extending grace to ourselves and others as we work on healing must be a part of the work. As we work on inclusive and sustainable alternatives to the systems of oppression we are working to dismantle, everyone has to grapple with the fact that this work is never-ending so that we improve our working relationships and prevent burnout and disenchantment with movement work.