Alumni

Naya Jones

Naya Jones
Location: Santa Cruz, California Cohort Start Year: 2017 Project Topics: Arts in Health and Healing, Behavioral and Mental Health, Environmental Justice, Food Systems and Nutrition Populations Served: African-American/Black, Hispanic/Latino/Latinx
Managing Director
Get Rooted Consulting, LLC

FOCUS
Throughout American cities, Black, indigenous, and people of color communities {BIPOC} and BIPOC-led organizations navigate the intertwined challenges of food injustice, displacement, and wellbeing. As a geographer and healing arts practitioner, I help organizations and cultural workers put healing arts into everyday practice as they reimagine food and healing systems. Through collaborative research and healing arts like meditation and movement, somatic inquiry, ancestral healing ways, and more, we harness local knowledge and we build collective capacity for now – and for the future.

STRATEGIC INITIATIVE: From the Root Health Equity Project
From the Root (FtR) mobilizes healing arts for health equity. As a translocal capacity-building initiative, FtR partners with people of color-led and justice-centered organizations around the country who are working at the intersection of health and economy building. These partners are “working roots”—they recognize root causes of health inequity, and they harness cultural resources to reimagine and stimulate economy building. By doing so, they promote economic autonomy, challenge gentrification, and support the ability for historically oppressed populations to thrive in place. FtR will support this work through capacity building rooted in healing arts, defined here as practices that support group reflection, inquiry, visioning, and overall trauma-conscious design for internal building, as well as outreach. I will creatively archive partnerships using writing, visuals, and interviews for pop-ups that amplify partners’ work and provide insights for future health and wealth changemakers.

MORE ABOUT NAYA
As a geographer, meditation guide, and action educator, I bridge knowledge communities and sectors. I combine training in trauma-informed mind/body wellness with a PhD in geography.

Click here to watch Naya’s Legacy Project video.