Access Strategies Fund is excited to announce a new team and structure!
2020 brought us many lessons, heartaches, experiments, solidarity, and more. The team at Access Strategies Fund made it a priority to lean into work that more deeply aligned our funding, organizing, and internal culture with our values. We have learned so much and are proud to highlight our driving objectives as an organization.
Access Strategies Fund is committed to collective decision-making, new ways of being rooted in cooperativism, and to promoting the leadership of community organizers within the organization and the field of philanthropy. Now and always, Access Strategies Fund will support (1) pro-democracy community groups, (2) the public leadership of women, nonbinary and genderqueer people of color, and (3) the exploration and creation of new systems rooted in cooperativism, and alternatives to capitalism.
Leaning into our values is an evolving process, and we are enthusiastic about the recent shifts we have made in staff leadership, and the ways our staff will be sharing responsibility to achieve our objectives.
As of 2021, Access Strategies Fund has shifted to a Co-Director led organization. Access will now be led by Jasmine Gomez and Cairo Mendes. Reina Guevara, who is an incredible thought partner and support in all of our areas of work, is also a key member of our team.
The Access Team gives so much love to Alexie Torres, who set the path to so many of our beautiful transformations within philanthropy. Alexie will be moving into an Interim Managing Director role at the Partnership for Democracy and Education.
Access Strategies Fund is excited to continue building new worlds with you!
Here is a little more about each of our staff members!
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Jasmine Gomez, Esq.
Co-Director
Jasmine Gomez is a Co-Director at Access Strategies Fund. Jasmine is a queer, Puerto Rican attorney and activist in the Boston community. Jasmine advocates for racial equity, political equality, queer and trans liberation, the decolonization of Puerto Rico, and more through direct action, education, legal aid, healing justice, organizing, and empowering communities most marginalized by systems of oppression.
At Access Strategies Fund, Jasmine has led our main program areas of civic engagement, women’s public leadership, and solidarity economy initiative. In each of these areas, Jasmine has worked with community leaders to create strategic development around the goals, budget, and arc of the program. Jasmine has supported weaving into these programs healing justice practices, critical analysis, and radical imagination through popular education and facilitation. Jasmine also works in each of these areas to support fundraising and thinking of new ways to expand support to our ecosystems.
Previous to Access Strategies Fund, Jasmine was a constitutional lawyer and Democracy Honors Fellow at Free Speech For People. While there Jasmine provided legal research and organizing strategies to aid grassroots organizations advancing a Constitutional amendment to eliminate unlimited influence of money on elections and end corporation’s claiming Constitutional rights. While at FSFP, Jasmine used their critical race theory framework to pioneer a number of reports, events, and initiatives working toward making the pro-democracy community more intersectional and inclusive.
Jasmine is on the board of the Massachusetts National Lawyers Guild and Movement Sustainability Commons. Jasmine attended law school at Boston University, where Jasmine worked with the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, served as the co-president to the Latin American Law Student Association, was on the Journal of Science and Technology Law, and developed frameworks rooted in critical race theory and intersectionality.
Interests: Jasmine loves video games, afro-futurism, dogs, tiktok, cooking, and medicine making <3
Quote from favorite author (Octavia Butler, Parable of Talents):
Self is.
Self is body and bodily
Perception. Self is taught, memory,
Belief. Self creates. Self destroys.
Self learns, discovers, becomes.
Self shapes. Self adapts. Self
invents its own reasons for being.
To shape God, shape Self.
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Cairo Mendes
Co-Director
Cairo Mendes is a queer-latinx-undocumented organizer, facilitator and community builder. Over the last ten years he has been active in social justice spaces both on the local and national level. For seven of those years, Cairo was a leader in the immigrant rights movement, through various leadership roles at The Student Immigrant Movement (SIM), one of the first undocumented, youth-led groups in the country. During his time at SIM, Cairo co-led anti-deportation and education equity campaigns and was responsible for overseeing recruitment, popular education programs and supporting grassroots teams across the state. Cairo was also an active national leader through United We Dream, at its height the largest undocumented youth-led network in the country, and was a fellow turned advisory board member of the Young People For network, a national leadership program under The People For The American Way Foundation (PFAW). Mostly recently Cairo was a member of the New Leaders Council 2019 Boston cohort and currently serves as a board member of BAGLY (The Boston Alliance of Gay, Lesbian, Queer & Trans Youth). Cairo is also a member of the Community Investments Committee at The Lenny Zakim Fund.
Prior to his Co-Director role at Access Strategies Fund, Cairo was the Sr. Associate of Programs at The Boston Foundation. In this role, Cairo authored a framework to guide grantmaking investments towards local social justice movements and deepen The Foundation’s relationship to organizing and advocacy groups. Continuing in this philanthropic journey, Cairo is committed to pushing the sector to be more representative, transparent and accountable to the communities it aims to support.
Interests: In his spare time, Cairo likes to draw, write, and learn how to cook and bake (especially pão de queijo). He also loves traveling, watching corny netflix movies with his friends and family, and playing with his beloved dog, Snoopy.
Favorite quote: “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” - Lilla Watson, Aboriginal organizer, scholar and artist
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Reina Guevara
Financial, Program, and Administrative Associate
Reina Guevara is an undocumented immigrant from El Salvador. She came to the United States at the age of 11 to reunite with her mother after being separated during the civil war in Central America. After being undocumented for eleven years, Reina decided to join the Student Immigrant Movement (SIM). SIM was created by undocumented youth and led by undocumented youth to be at the frontlines of their liberation. In 2017, Reina became the Development Director of the Student Immigrant Movement. Reina helped organize, recruit, and raise funds for programs that politicize undocumented youth and provided a safe space to build community. She also fundraised money to help Deferred Action For Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients to pay for their renewal fees. Reina recently completed The Boston Foundation’s Boston Neighborhood Fellowship. She graduated from the University of Massachusetts Boston with a B. A in Philosophy & Public Policy, and a minor in Philosophy of Law.
Interest: Reina enjoys craft projects/ DIY (transforming old furniture, creating costumes for her & her dog Angel AKA Chewbacca/Pechuga). Reina loves reading, especially comic books. She also likes to collect record vinyls that she buys from thrift stores, dancing and cooking salvi food with her family.
Quote:
“The land knows you, even when you are lost”
-Robin Wall Kimmerer
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