The Rooted Collective is comprised of artists, activists and scholars based in Maryland.
Members
Saida Agostini is a queer afro-guyanese poet, activist, and survivor. She has dedicated her career to building peer led healing spaces for Black queer people. A published writer, her work has been featured in a number of publications including TORCH, pluck! and The Baltimore Sun. Saida’s first collection of poems, let the dead in, was a finalist for the Center of African American Poetry & Poetics’ 2020 Book Prize as well as the New Issues Poetry Prize. She is the author of STUNT (Neon Hemlock, October 2020), a chapbook exploring the history of Nellie Jackson, a Black woman entrepreneur who operated a brothel for sixty years in Natchez, Mississippi. Her poetry can also be found in the Black Ladies Brunch Collective's anthology Not Without Our Laughter, Barrelhouse Magazine, Hobart Pulp, Plume, and other publications.
Dr. Kalima Young is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electronic Media and Film at Towson University. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Maryland College Park. Her research explores the impact of race and gender-based trauma on Black identity, media, and cultural production. A Baltimore native, videographer, and activist, Dr. Young served on the leadership team for FORCE: Upsetting Rape Culture’s Monument Quilt Project from 2014 to its culmination. She is also a member of Rooted, a Black LGBTQ healing collective. Her new manuscript, Mediated Misogynoir: The Erasure of Black Women and Girls’ Pain the Public Imagination was released by Rowman and Littlefield’s Lexington Books in 2022. To find out more about her work, check out www.kalimayoung.com.
Blair Franklin is a Black transfemme facilitator and transition doula. Her work exists at the intersection of land, spirit, and community, centering the belief that the embodied liberation of Black queer and trans people, women, and femmes will ultimately catalyze the abundant worlds we desire. This has included co-leading legislative efforts to increase housing access for young people, designing large-scale conferences and events centering joy and critical consciousness raising for LGBTQ youth, organizing grief rituals with local organizers, and weaving connections between land stewards across the African diaspora. She runs a consulting practice called Alight Alchemy, born out of a need to better sustain our movements. Through that work, she provides tools for fiscal sponsors to model systems of care and accountability, operational infrastructure support to grassroots organizations, facilitation & coaching for movement leaders grounded in loving accountability, and multidisciplinary healing for people moving through change. As a trained death doula, she accompanies leaders to move through the ongoing cycle of death and rebirth in their work, inviting change as abundant, necessary, and grounded in the earth's wisdom and seasonal shifts present all around us.
Dr. Nkiru Nnawulezi is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and Affiliate Faculty at Yale School of Public Health. She earned her doctorate in Ecological-Community Psychology at the Michigan State University and has additional graduate certifications in college teaching, community engagement, and quantitative research methods. Her research examines the ecological factors that enhance equity within and across the domestic violence housing continuum. She aims to improve the social and material conditions for survivors of gender-based violence who occupy multiply marginalized social identities. Dr. Nnawulezi also seeks to develop sustainable survivor-centered, community-based systems of support that can serve as alternatives to traditional social service systems. Her work has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, State of Michigan, and Center for Victim Research. She is an award-winning researcher and mentor and has disseminated her scholarship to academic, policy, and community audiences. As an expert in community-based, participatory research and trained facilitator, Dr. Nnawulezi designs participatory research processes with community partners to find innovative solutions to complex social problems. She serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Family Violence and is on the editorial board of the Community Psychology in the Global Perspective Journal. She is also a Research and Evaluation Advisor to multiple systems change organizations such as the National Resource Center on Domestic Violence, DC Coalition Against Domestic Violence, National Innovative Service, and Ujima: The National Center on Violence Against Women in the Black Community.
Ti Malik Coleman is a seasoned storyteller, comedian and teacher. A Black genderqueer performer, he is dedicated to building spaces for black queer and trans* folks to come together, and share stories as a mechanism of healing and celebration. As a community artist, they teach students and organizations how to use art to facilitate change. Ti Malik is a founding member of the all black improv group, Casually Dope, and has featured at improv festivals in Toronto, Chicago, New York, DC, and Philadelphia.
Erica Woodland (he/him), LCSW is a Black queer, trans masculine facilitator, consultant, psychotherapist and healing justice practitioner who has worked at the intersections of movements for racial, gender, economic, trans and queer justice and liberation for more than 20 years. He has extensive experience working with youth, people of color, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities across the United States. Erica is the Founding Director of the National Queer and Trans Therapists of Color Network (NQTTCN), a healing justice organization that actively works to transform mental health for Queer and Trans Black, Indigenous and People of Color. Under his leadership, NQTTCN has trained and mobilized hundreds of mental health practitioners committed to intervening on the legacy of harm and violence of the medical industrial complex while building liberatory models of care rooted in abolition. Erica is co-editor of Healing Justice Lineages: Dreaming at the Crossroads of Liberation, Collective Care and Safety, with Cara Page (North Atlantic Books, 2023).
Monique Meadows is a principal consultant with Banyan Coaching and Consulting, whose mission is to create healthy, vibrant, and sustainable cultures through holistic coaching and facilitation in social change organizations. Through her work, Monique organically weaves the wisdom of earth-based traditions with sound organizational change theories to create meaningful transformation for individuals and organizations around the country. Her love for the natural world is integrated into all that she does, and at the core, her work is as a healer. This core, combined with being a black, queer woman moving through the world with an invisible disability, allows her to center love, empathy and compassion in her work. She is featured in The Spirit of Social Change: Love, Hope, Faith and Joy in Intersectional Activism and a published author in Spirited: Affirming the Soul and the Black Gay/Lesbian Identity and W.I.T.C.H. Voices: Women In Tune With Conscious Healing. She earned a Master’s degree in Organization Development from American University and a coaching certificate from the Teleos Leadership Institute.
