Afrofuturist, Educator, Organizer
Zebi, a self-described Afrofuturist, has been an educator and organizer for over 20 years and is currently a co-director at Kite’s Nest - a liberatory learning center located in Hudson, New York. Following the unjust deportation of her father and his treatment in the upstate prison system, Zebi divested from her studies at SUNY New Paltz to return with him to their homeland of Jamaica. She engaged her community in a local vision of prosperity that rejected the propaganda of the American Dream. She founded a youth-run community organization dedicated to ameliorating the conditions that accelerate rural migration. The Lil Raggamuffin Summer Camp mobilized hundreds of young people and grew to be recognized as one of the top youth programs in Jamaica. Returning to New York, Zebi’s organizing work continued to follow a divest/invest framework: working at GOLES to support small businesses and public housing residents' fight against gentrification; mobilizing New York retail workers to gain collective bargaining agreements through the RWDSU; organizing the annual Sista-2-Sista Youth Summit in Brooklyn. For the past seven years, Zebi has anchored herself in Columbia County, bringing her leadership to Kite’s Nest’s Social Justice Leadership Academy and ReGen Teen Greenhouse (an environmental justice project), while also co-stewarding the construction of a liberatory learning campus scheduled to open in 2025. This campus will be a space for intergenerational community organizers to convene, cross-pollinate, learn, and experiment.