AORTA

Tyrone Boucher is an organizer, trainer, writer, and artist currently based in Belfast, Maine. He is passionate about grassroots healing and cultural work, transformative justice, and anticapitalist, community-rooted models of resource sharing.

He first become politicized through queer, trans, and feminist organizing, and now finds his political home in broad-based movements for liberation; he believes that all of our liberation is bound up together, and that true social change is a collective process. He works closely with the Bay Area based POOR Magazine, a poor and indigenous people-led grassroots organization, doing economic justice work through art, organizing, grassroots media, education, and multigenerational community building.

Tyrone worked in food co-ops for five years, at both the Wheatsville Food Co-op in Austin, TX, and the Mariposa Food Coop in Philadelphia, where he co-founded the Food Justice and Anti-Racism working group.

In 2008, Tyrone co-founded the blog Enough: The Personal Politics of Resisting Capitalism, a space to share strategies for creating more just and economically sustainable movements, with Dean Spade. Building off the critical conversations Enough inspired, Tyrone and Dean are now co-editing a new anthology of the same title.  

Tyrone has facilitated workshops and consulted for many organizations and conferences including Resource Generation, Catalyst Project, the 2010 Making Money for Our Movements Conference, and Lucy Stone Cooperative.

Tyrone was named one of UTNE Reader's 50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World in 2009 and is featured in the book Do It Anyway: Portraits of the Next Generation of Activists, from Beacon Press.

You can contact Tyrone at: tyrone(at)aortacollective(dot)org

Radicalized through the Unitarian Universalist youth movement as a teenager, Lydia’s politics are grounded in the revolutionary possibilities of transformative love and compassion. Lydia has organized in various movements for social and economic justice including supporting community-based struggles for affordable housing and prison reform/abolition in New Orleans where she resides. She also serves on the Board of the North American Students of Cooperation (NASCO) to strengthen solidarity economies.

Additionally, she has worked towards the anti-racist/anti-oppressive transformation of several organizations such as Young Religious Unitarian Universalists (YRUU), the Oberlin College Student Cooperative Association (OSCA), Common Ground Relief, and NASCO.

In addition, Lydia dreams of building a radical left intellectualism grounded in and relevant to social movements. To that end, she is actively researching and writing untold stories of white anti-racist activism and Southern prisoners’ organizing.

Currently she serves as the Director of Religious Education at the First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans where she works to further multigenerational spiritual life.

She has facilitated workshops for a range of conferences and organizations including the White Privilege Conference, NASCO Cooperative Education and Training Institute, the National Worker Cooperative Conference, the Liberal Religious Educators Association, and AVODAH. Lydia's writing has appeared in Left Turn Magazine, The Indypendent, and Monthly Review.

You can contact Lydia at: lydia(at)aortacollective(dot)org