Meet CT Mirror’s 2023 Community Editorial Board members

Sacha Armstrong-Crocket

Sacha Armstrong-Crockett was born and raised in Connecticut. She moved again to her hometown of Middletown in 2003 together with her husband to lift their 5 youngsters. Sacha was a pre-k trainer earlier than changing into a realtor in 2017. She’s presently contracted with one of many high worldwide brokerages in luxurious actual property.

Sacha is an anti-racism activist and actual property is on the middle of that work. After receiving her At Residence With Variety certificates she created honest housing schooling for 1st time BIPOC patrons. The curriculum unpacks the historical past of segregation, redlining, financial institution fraud, Black land loss, CT migration information and extra whereas additionally offering assets for BIPOC patrons. DeSegregate CT featured her of their instructional movies. She’s a #bestofhartford winner within the Particular person Realtor class for 2022.

Her notable accomplishments inside her group embrace Wesleyan College’s Embodying Anti-Racism fellow, co-chair of the Mayor’s Anti-Racism Job Drive and co-conspirator with Middletown Racial Justice Coalition. Sacha has additionally been an energetic member of the Middletown Democratic City Committee since 2017. Her proudest accomplishment in that house is the victory of the city’s First Black State Consultant, the late Quentin Williams. To be taught extra about Sacha’s work you’ll be able to watch her TedXHartford discuss renaming the city center faculty after a Black household of abolitionists.

Tyrone Bynum

Tyrone Bynum Jr. was born in New Haven, Connecticut in Might 1988. The next 12 months, Tyrone and his household would spend the subsequent 11 years of his life dwelling in Oakland, California. Within the 12 months of 1999, Tyrone and his household relocated again to Connecticut, this time shifting to Hartford, the place Tyrone attended and accomplished elementary by way of highschool. Tyrone’s dedication has been to youth engagement with boys and males of coloration. Neighborhood engagement, and violence prevention. Tyrone discovered his ardour working with youth throughout his teenage years as a camp counselor. Later he grew to become a gaggle chief for numerous earlier than and after faculty packages within the better Hartford space. Tyrone has additionally facilitated youth teams for numerous organizations, comparable to Blue Hills Civic Affiliation.

Tyrone presently works at Hartford Communities That Care in Hartford’s Northeast neighborhood as a Disaster Intervention Specialist. The group’s mission assertion is to offer a violent-drug free atmosphere, whereas offering high quality providers wanted for households locally.

Richard Frieder

Richard Frieder works in group engagement with Neighborhood Capability Builders. He helped discovered and continues to be very energetic with a number of group engagement initiatives in Hartford together with Hartford Resolve$ (participatory budgeting), the Hartford Votes~Hartford Vota Coalition, Know Thy Neighbor (group dialogues with neighborhood residents, the religion group, and police), and the Collaborative on Poverty, Legal Justice & Race. He’s a Community Advisor with On a regular basis Democracy and was Neighborhood Engagement Director at Hartford Public Library from 2001-2016.

Richard is a member of the Connecticut Heart for Nonviolence Board of Administrators. In 2018 he served as a Fellow on the College of Connecticut Humanities Institute within the Humility and Conviction in Public Life undertaking.

Marisol Garcia

Marisol Garcia is a graduate scholar at Trinity Faculty the place she graduated in Might 2022 with a BA in Public Coverage and regulation and can graduate in Might 2023 together with her MAPP. Ms. Garcia is a graduate of the partnership between the Heart for Jail Training program at Wesleyan College which began whereas incarcerated and completed upon her launch in 2019 with an associates diploma in Political Science in 2020. She can also be a 2021-2022 Yale Regulation Faculty Entry fellow and a 2022-2023 Faculty to Profession fellow at Yale Jail Training Initiative the place she pursue analysis on mass incarceration, coverage and the regulation.

Marisol hopes to make a long run affect on the healthcare outcomes of these which are presently incarcerated, re-entry providers for these returning dwelling, and sentencing for these nonetheless in pre-trial standing.

Sourav Guha

sourav guha has been a resident of Connecticut for 15 years and has lived in New Haven for the previous six. He has twenty years of expertise throughout a broad number of roles within the public, nonprofit, and postsecondary sectors, together with a few years engaged on points pertaining to illustration, entry, and inclusion in larger schooling.

Presently, he’s government director of the Consortium on Excessive Achievement and Success, hosted at Trinity Faculty, and an adjunct teacher of presidency and worldwide relations at Connecticut Faculty. He beforehand held administrative positions at Vassar and Yale, in addition to administrative and tutorial roles at Wesleyan College, his undergraduate alma mater. He additionally briefly served as the upper schooling funds analyst on the State of Connecticut’s Workplace of Coverage and Administration.

Past his skilled work, a few of sourav’s pursuits and commitments concern points associated to environmental and power insurance policies, housing availability and affordability, and the endless enlargement of our military- and security-industrial complexes. He believes extra humane, beneficiant, simply, and ecologically-sensitive methods of dwelling are attainable, in Connecticut and in our nation extra broadly.

Jennifer Heikkila Díaz

Jennifer (JHD/Jenny) Heikkila Díaz (they/she) was born and raised in Los Ángeles. Witnessing the LA Rebellion of 1992 and their household’s immigration experiences seeded JHD’s need to coalition construct throughout communities of coloration and inside their very own Korean American and Asian American communities.

For nearly twenty-five years, JHD has labored as a Ok-12 public faculty trainer, faculty administrator, and educator coach, co-creating culturally sustaining and anti-biased, anti-racist school rooms and college communities with 1000’s of scholars, households, and educators in Baltimore, South (Central) LA, Lengthy Seashore (CA), Echo Park, Queens, and throughout CT. They’re the CT Council for the Social Research Skilled Studying Coordinator, and facilitate statewide trainer communities of observe as an Anti-Racist Educating and Studying Collective Steering Committee Member and a UConn AAASI Activist in Residence.

They’re a New Havener and co-founder of aapiNHV. Their lifelong dedication is to backing youth, who envision an much more joyful and simply world than they do.

Kat Morris

Katharine (Kat) Morris is a scholar-activist for intersectional environmental justice together with her Grasp of Public Coverage from the College of Connecticut. She based UConn Collaborative Organizing (UCCO) to advertise solidarity and intersectionality in social and environmental justice actions. Her TEDxUConn speak, How you can Collaborate for Environmental Justice, is a name to motion discussing environmental racism, well being inequities, and the way to set up your group utilizing radical love and intersectionality. Kat plans to sometime earn her PhD utilizing cognitive science to strengthen collective efficacy and coverage motion on the intersections of environmental justice, well being fairness, and local weather motion. As of late, she organizes grassroots and legislative motion and speaks on varied panels and podcasts, whereas serving on the board for CT Roundtable on Local weather and Jobs.

Following her most up-to-date positions because the coverage intern for CT’s Well being Fairness Options and Sustainability Fellow for the U.S Environmental Safety Company, Kat served her Helen Gurley Brown Fellowship at CEEJH, the Heart for Neighborhood Engagement, Environmental Justice, and Well being. She organized the first annual Seaside Sounds for Environmental Justice group empowerment pageant at Seaside Park on July fifteenth. Kat was appointed to the Connecticut Fairness and Environmental Justice Advisory Council (CEEJAC) then served as a Governor’s Infrastructure Funding and Jobs Act (IIJA) Advisor stationed within the Workplace of the Commissioner at DEEP. In the present day she runs Seaside Sounds Membership, consults domestically and internationally, and organizes to Save Bassick Excessive!

Most significantly, Kat is a tree-hugging hippie, queer pisces daughter of Jamaican immigrants whose love for nature is comparable solely to her love for music, meals, astrology, laughter, and studying about life by way of significant connections and long-winded conversations.

Zach Oberholtzer

Zach Oberholtzer presently works as a biochemist in pharmaceutical improvement. With a background in chemical engineering and statistics Zach is keen on pulling aside the mechanisms of how social, authorities, and financial techniques work together. He’s particularly keen on how housing and transportation coverage impact financial alternative and can be utilized to construct inclusive communities. Zach is a member of Individuals Pleasant Stamford, an area advocacy group for protected strolling and biking infrastructure and housing abundance.

When not working or learning, Zach dabbles in writing dangerous poetry, taking part in final frisbee, and baking recipes he discovered on the web.

Cindy Prizio

Cindy Prizio, is the cofounder of One Customary of Justice (OSJ); established in 2015. OSJ is a Connecticut civil rights advocacy group and affiliate of the Nationwide Affiliation for Rational Sexual Offense Legal guidelines (NARSOL). OSJ, NARSOL and different associates across the nation work for evidence-based legal guidelines and public insurance policies to create and maintain safer communities. OSJ has launched its 2023 legislative marketing campaign referred to as Paid In Full to launch males, girls and youngsters who had been retroactively and unfairly placed on the general public registry on the time of its inception in 1998.

Cindy is an efficient citizen lobbyist/educator who additionally advocates for trauma-informed restorative justice and is working to deliver a pilot program to the state as an alternative choice to the legal authorized system. Just lately Cindy created Buddies of Restorative Justice of CT (FoRJ-CT) to help a therapeutic justice and work with ForJ members towards providing victims of crime a selection. Her different advocacy efforts embrace aiding with litigation and offering instructional webinars to shine a light-weight on the information about sexual hurt. The most recent in that sequence can be broadcast on January 17 and February 15, 2023 and is entitled respectively, “A Completely different Method to Intercourse Crimes. the Case for Survivor-Centered Restorative Justice?” And “Males Who Watch Little one Sexual Exploitation Materials (CSEM). What’s the actual danger?”

Cindy lives in Hartford County to be a stone’s throw from the Capitol. When she’s not working for social justice and legal authorized reforms, she’s content material to be working in her pollinator’s backyard.

Robert Boris

Robert Boris is a tech entrepreneur with over thirty years of expertise within the subject. He began his profession in analysis and innovation and went on to ascertain Command Tech, as a expertise firm that focuses on cloud computing and cyber safety. In alignment with the Soviet Nuclear Risk Discount Act of 1991, Robert negotiated a three way partnership with the Keldysh Institute of Utilized Arithmetic in Moscow and led analysis and commercialization efforts to develop parallel algorithms for operations on 3D spatial information saved in a grid database. The ensuing expertise has been adopted by america Air Drive, Pratt & Whitney, NATO allies and extra.

As Chairman of the Groton Financial Growth Fee, Chairman of the Mystic Chamber of Commerce basis, and President of Command Expertise in Groton, Boris performs an instrumental position in main initiatives to develop and implement efficient insurance policies that profit the group. Along with his skilled pursuits, Robert can also be an energetic member of his group, a father, and a volunteer for native non-profit organizations that concentrate on service and schooling. He acts as a mentor for aspiring downside solvers and believes within the potential of expertise to result in optimistic change on this planet.

He holds a grasp’s diploma from the London Faculty of Economics, in addition to a bachelor’s in linguistics from Syracuse College.

Jordyn Wilson

Jordyn Wilson is a Youth Justice Marketing campaign Affiliate with the Sentencing Undertaking. She works to make sure the voices of people most impacted by the authorized system are integrated into all selections concerning authorized system coverage, observe and reform. Jordyn seeks to construct opportunity-rich communities, the place all households and youth have the help they should thrive, by way of equitable entry to assets and providers.

Beforehand, she served as a Neighborhood Connections Affiliate and Justice Advisor with the Connecticut Justice Alliance the place she led roundtable conversations, known as Imaginative and prescient Periods, with straight impacted youth, households and communities to establish options to reform or change techniques that funnel youth into the justice system and construct the management of straight impacted youth to show their reality into energy. Jordyn additionally served as an Rising Leaders Committee Member with the Coalition for Juvenile Justice and a Youth First Youth Leaders Community Member with the Youth First Initiative.

Jordyn obtained her Bachelor’s Diploma in Justice & Regulation Administration from Western Connecticut State College as a primary technology faculty scholar.