Please join the Urban Equity Collaborative for the 2025 Community Fellows Final Presentations and Celebration. Centering on issues of dispossession and displacement, the Community Fellows Program invites community organizers, movement leaders, stakeholders, and artists to engage with the University of Maryland community to develop and strengthen their work on social, political, and economic justice. Operating as a fellowship, the Community Fellows Program offers the time and funding needed to think, research, reflect, and re-envision strategies concerning their activism and work with the support of UEC leadership and staff.

The UEC focus of the 2025 Community Fellows Program is on the climate crisis and the dispossession and displacement that occurs in marginalized communities as a result. This semester, the 2025 cohort of the UEC Community Fellows Program includes Ness Perry, State Engagement Lead at Envoy Public Labs and former Advocacy Specialist at LEDC, Jose Coronado-Flores, solar panel installation technician and former Climate Research and Policy Analyst at CASA, and Xavier Brown, Founder of Soilful City, Co-founder of Black Dirt Farm Collective, and the Director of the UDC Community to Career Academy and the Ambassador for the Anacostia. The three fellows engaged in interdisciplinary dialogues, workshops, and research to address the multiple and compounding forms of dispossession and displacement impacting their communities. For this event, the three fellows will present on their projects with the UEC and answer questions.

All presentations will be live-streamed and recorded. Refreshments will be served! While we welcome folks to stay for the entirety of the event, we understand that schedules may not allow that. Please feel free to join for part of the event and see the schedule below to coordinate. Please come out to support the Community Fellows’ impressive work!

Schedule and Descriptions:

Welcome 12:00pm-12:20pm 

José Coronado-Flores “Polluting Infrastructure and Our Addiction to Convenience.”| 12:20pm- 1:05pm

José Coronado-Flores will present on topics including increase in waste after migration, climate displacement, widespread estrangement from energy production, waste management, as well as food growth, cultural and institutional barriers to sustainability, and opportunities for sustainability.

Ness Perry, “Making a Just Transition: Understanding Climate Displacement Risk and Community Response in South Phoenix.”| 1:05 pm-1:55pm

Ness Perry will present on their research on the intersection of energy justice and climate displacement in South Phoenix, Arizona. In particular, Ness has sought to understand in what ways are South Phoenix communities vulnerable in the midst of policy changes and shifts away from fossil fuels.

Xavier Brown, “Soil 2 Soul: Reestablishing Ubuntu.” | 1:55 pm-2:45 pm

Xavier Brown will discuss the origin of Soilful City and the steps he has taken this semester to formalize and expand his organization into a nonprofit. Xavier’s goal is to develop a Black-led community education and mentorship hub that leverages the wisdom of Nature as inspiration to facilitate a safe space for liberated thinking, skill-building for our youth, and intergenerational community organizing and healing as a form of resistance.