The Squad
Youth Speaks is comprised of passionate
artists and educators.
Jennifer Lou
Co-Interim Executive Director
Born and raised in Connecticut, educated in New York City, with roots in 臺灣 and 中國, Jennifer Lou now calls San Francisco home. She returns to Youth Speaks in this interim period, having previously served as a Board member (2011-2021) and interim Co-ED (2021). Jen has worked at Google, Ogilvy, and startups spanning finance, publishing, and AI. She serves on the DEIB committee at Alta Vista School. Jen is published in the anthology Breakfast from Mars; a co-editor of Hard Listening: The Greatest Rock Band Ever (of Authors) Tells All; and is currently writing memoir. She holds a B.A. from Columbia University.
Evan Bissell
Co-Interim Executive Director
Evan Bissell is an artist intentionally working across disciplines, sectors and issues. With groups around the country, he has mobilized poetic knowledge and practice in the development of curriculum, programs, public art, laws, books, and convenings that build imagination, power and capacity around the just transition, anti-prison efforts, housing justice, democracy and health equity, among others. Evan recently managed the City of Oakland’s Cultural Strategist-in-Government program and was the lead program designer for Youth Speaks’ Power Lab. Evan created the Arts & Cultural Strategy program at the Othering & Belonging Institute and helped found Richmond LAND, the first community land trust in Contra Costa county. He is the artist director at Another World Exists, an art, research, and cultural strategy practice that connects radical imagination with implementation to strengthen holistic change for collective liberation.
Hawah Kasat
Co-Interim Executive Director
Hawah Kasat is a celebrated educator, author, community organizer, non-profit leader, TEDx speaker, and yogi. In 2000, he co-founded One Common Unity (OCU), a non-profit that supports the building of a non-violent culture through education, mental health care, and the arts. During his tenure as executive director, OCU grew to over 35 full-time employees, operating in 24 schools and serving over 40,000 youth and families. Hawah and OCU received the highest honor in Washington, D.C.—the Mayor’s Arts Award for Excellence in the Humanities. He also received the National SHIFT Award and the “Legacy of a Dream Award” for his pioneering work integrating arts empowerment and social-emotional learning with environmental justice.
Hawah has been a guest speaker and workshop presenter at Yale University, George Washington University, UCLA, the University of Colorado, Rollins College, the University of Maryland, Georgetown University, and Brown University, among many others. He has appeared on XM National Satellite Radio, BBC, Fox News, NBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera. After graduating from American University with degrees in Education and Psychology, he was awarded a fellowship by the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Foundation to serve as a representative to the United Nations and the World Conference Against Racism. Later, he completed the Nonprofit Management Executive Leadership certificate program at Georgetown University.
In his spare time, Hawah enjoys finding new foods to mix with chocolate, climbing trees and buildings, performing handstands on furniture, hiking through mountains in flip-flops, body surfing ocean waves, making animal sounds and bird calls, enjoying a glass of wine at high altitude, lighting candles in dark rooms, and traveling.
Joan Osato
Director of Narrative Change & Field Building
Joan has played a pivotal role in local and national theater for over two decades and is a committed local and national community organizer. A core member of Youth Speaks since 2001 where she produces live performance events including Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Festival annually in rotating cities around the country, she is also a Producer for The Living Word Project and the critically acclaimed theater group Campo Santo. As a cultural organizer - she works on behalf of national networks and sits on the boards of the National Performance Network, and the Consortium of Asian American Theaters and Artists.
She is an awardee of prestigious grants from the MAP Fund, the Wattis Foundation, Kenneth Rainin Foundation, and the Creative Work Fund. She was the inaugural recipient of SFAC’s Artist and Communities Partnership Grant, Theater Bay Area Award for Excellence in Video Design (Tribes by Nina Raine, at Berkeley Rep) and the Surdna Foundation’s Artists Engaged in Social Change Award. She has been recognized for her work as a photographer from Artslant, Prix de Photographie, Laguna Arte Prize and has exhibited throughout the San Francisco Bay Area since 2009. In 2019 she received Cal Shakes Luminary Award for Community Engagement, and was named a recipient of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, YBCA 100.
Stephanie Cajina
Deputy Director
7Stephanie Cajina is a first-generation college graduate. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Urban and Regional Studies from Cornell University. She has over 10 years of experience working in economic development and advocating for economic justice and equity. Throughout her career, she has sought to address structural barriers to success. Prior to joining the Youth Speaks team, she worked with various municipalities to advance economic development initiatives. She has extensive nonprofit management experience having served as Executive Director for five years of the Excelsior Action Group and in governance leadership roles for various nonprofits, coalitions, and foundations. Most recently, Stephanie was appointed by Mayor London Breed and San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors to serve as Board Director for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. She is the only Latinx representative on the Board. Throughout her academic and professional journey, Stephanie and her family benefited from many nonprofit programs and services and understand their transformational power first-hand. She is excited to join the Youth Speaks team and support our youth, team, and board in being agents of change!
Darius Rashad Parker
Creative Youth Development and Arts In Education Director
Darius Rashad Parker Is a Queer Black Scholar, Activist, Poet, and Performer born and raised in Chicago, IL. Darius is a graduate of Northern Illinois University where he received his Bachelor's in Journalism and a minor in Black Studies. Darius’ teaching, research, performance, and activism has grown out of his commitment to social justice, focusing on arts, culture, race and gender inequities in education, and performance art. He is particularly concerned with the relationship of educational practices, and the politics of Queer & racial identities and the intersections between community and academia. His previous role included contributing to an educational model that will build transformative schools, where students, parents and their communities play a key role in public education. He is active in multiple coalitions of educators, artists, activists, and community organizations. Darius demonstrates a commitment to centering the whole person in a way that involves both children, family, individuals and community partners at the core. Globally, Darius contributes frequently to forums of parents and teachers, as well as locally facilitates opportunities for youth and their families to engage with Social Justice work through arts and culture. Darius collaborates with an array of national collectives and organizations enabling him to produce large scale culturally relevant programming. His work in arts and culture has contributed to local dialogues on topics of educational injustices, and Hip Hop Ed praxi. As of late Darius has led multiple workshops and Think Tanks on Anti-Racist Education and on how educators can show up at their best for students. Darius hopes to empower youth through the arts and to make any experience involving youth, art, and poetry one infused with love, liberation, and truth. Darius received his Master’s Degree in Critical Ethnic Studies from DePaul University in the Spring of 2020. Where he currently serves as an adjunct Professor in the Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies Department. Darius is also a member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity Inc. and serves as the National President of Delta Phi Delta Dance Fraternity Inc. Darius will be exiting his role as the Professional Development Coordinator for Anti-Racist Education for Chicago Public Schools and is excited to join the Mighty Youth Speaks team as the Director of Youth Development and Arts Education. Darius is excited to carry the spirit of Chicago and Kuumba Lynx to the Bay and is ready shake shift and flip tables for youth advocacy.
Bijou McDaniel
Director of Digital Pedagogy and Communications
Born and raised in Oakland CA, Bijou McDaniel is a community organizer, event producer, communications specialist, and creative with a diverse background that includes 15+ years of experience. Bijou joined Youth Speaks with a diverse background and skillsets in the areas of event production, marketing, communications, non-profit fundraising, talent acquisition, experiential design, and curation.
In 2016 Bijou Co-Founded the Oakland-based entertainment company OAKHELLA Entertainment — a community-focused music festival centered in a community garden in the historic Lower Bottoms neighborhood of West Oakland. Since launching, OAKHELLA has carved out an influential place within the cultural pulse of Oakland's creative scene with its signature music festival and high-quality events which have grown to include consultation, curation, marketing, and communications for organizations like REI, Goldenvoice, Outdoor Afro, Black Joy Parade, East Bay Regional Park District, the Oakland Museum of California, The Battery Club (SF) and more.
Nick James
Creative & Digital Impact Director
Nick James is an African-American artist who has worked in different capacities at Youth Speaks for the past 10 years. Nick utilizes his design talents as well as educator and activist background to help assist in the design and programmatic efforts for numerous nonprofits, small businesses, and initiatives. Past positions include founder and creative for I Create for a Living, UX Design for Center for Cultural Power, Curriculum Designer at Urban Arts Partnership, Designer for GirlTrek, and Director of Special Projects for Youth Together. Nick is born and raised in Oakland and is currently bicoastal between Oakland and Brooklyn.
Aleah Bradshaw
Manager of Creative Youth Development
Aleah Bradshaw, known performatively as Nyfe, is a 25-year-old performing artist, writer, and educator with a passion for poetry and hip hop as tools of liberation and creative expression. They were born and raised in Aurora, Colorado by two Trinidadian American immigrant parents and a community of poets and activists who inspired creativity in both their work and their conscious imagining of a world less overrun by racial discrimination, misogyny, queerphobia, and xenophobia. They now live in California, where they work as an artist and educator while managing their own small business and collective musical project closegood.
Gretchen Carvajal
Sr. Manager of Digital Pedagogy
Gretchen Carvajal (she/her) is an interdisciplinary Filipina artist from the Bay Area. She currently works as a teaching artist at the leading youth spoken word organization in the world, Youth Speaks, teaching high school spoken word at local San Francisco public schools. When she’s not in the classroom, she designs, manufactures, and promotes her laser-cut earring brand BRWNGRLZ. When she’s not making earrings, she’s making prints, bending neon, or making films.
Gretchen’s work revolves around her journey as an immigrant who came to the US at the age of 7. Her different art forms (printmaking, neon, film, poetry, jewelry) serve as languages that are able to convey her story past the tongue she was born with and the language she was forced to learn. When she’s not hustling multiple jobs/art forms to sustain living in the ever-gentrifying Bay Area, she’s talking about love or astrology, listening to I’m Still In Love With You by Sean Paul, taking care of her 5-year-old niece Leila, and cooking extremely large meals for her family.
Vania "Luna" Gutierrez
Manager of Arts in Education
Vania Luna Gutierrez (they/she) is a poet, performer, educator, and jewelry maker based in the Village of Huichin, on Lisjan Ohlone territory (Oakland, California). Originally from Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi lands (Chicago, IL), Vania is a Kuumba Lynx Alumni where they developed their artistic craft and their reverence for community organizing. They are a three-time Louder Than A Bomb Slam Champion and have toured throughout the country to share their work. Vania recently received a BA from Mills College with a major in Creative Writing and a minor in Ethnic Studies. Vania values collective healing and upliftment and understands poetry as a catalyst for transformation. They affirm that poetry is a critical tool in the liberation of all oppressed peoples, and is key in revitalizing and maintaining sacred, ancestral oral traditions. Vania is also the founder and creator of Luna Beadz, you can find her beadwork at lunallena.online.
Annie Jupiter-Jones
Director of Grants & Foundations
Annie is a proud daughter of San Francisco, born & raised in the Mission District where she proudly still works and lives with her own family. Annie has spent the last 35 years working to empower and uplift our city’s youth and using arts and sports as a form of activism to create positive change. Annie has served as a teacher in the SFUSD and as the Executive Director for Loco Bloco and Project Wreckless.
Annie was selected as Yerba Buena Center for the 2018-19 Arts Collective Safety Fellow and her project City Kids was featured at the 2019 YBCA Public Square. Annie works to increase gender equality in sports through Girls Baseball advocacy and currently serves as the manager of the San Francisco Bay Sox Girls Baseball Program. In 2020 Annie was appointed to the San Francisco Recreation & Parks Commission. When she is not at work, Annie teaches group fitness classes and can most often be found shuttling her three very active daughters around the city to their practices, games and performances.
Maximiliano Pierre Urruzmendi Mele
Technical Director of Productions
Born in Atlanta, Georgia to Uruguayan immigrants, Maximiliano is a community-trained multidisciplinary actor, teacher, technical director, lighting designer and college dropout living in the Bay Area. They fell in love with theater at a young age as a way to find allies. Maximiliano feels incredibly fortunate to conspire within artistic communities that prioritize engagement work centering listening, learning, healing, and reflecting creatively to offer transformative art. Maximiliano has had the privilege of working in varying artistic capacities with: Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s Peh/LO/tah(TD), Teada Production’s Masters of the Currents(TD/LD), Axis Dance Company (TD), Joanna Haigood’s Dying While Black & Brown (TD), Campo Santo/Ben Fisher’s Candlestick(LD), Paul Flores’ We Have Iré(LD), Be Steadwell’s A Letter to my Ex(LD), Noelle Viñas’ Abuelito(Father y Abuelito), Contra-Tiempo’s Joy(Us) Just(Us) (TD/SM), Campo Santo/Star Finch’s Side Effects (LD), Kristina Wong’s Sweatshop Overlord (Broadcasting/SM).
Maximiliano is honored and privileged to be a part of the team at Youth Speaks.
Leonard Sibala
Finance Director
Born in the Philippines and a recent transplant from Los Angeles, Leonard has been in operations and finance field for over a decade.
Most recently, Leonard served as the Operations & Finance Director at Teen Cancer America, where he oversaw everything from financial planning and HR to compliance and IT. His career includes leadership roles at a Bitcoin IRA, Innocean USA, and at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, where he managed multi-million-dollar budgets, improved operations, and led high-performing teams.
Leonard brings a strong mix of financial acumen, operational insight, and a passion for efficiency. Whether he’s restructuring benefits to better serve employees or implementing innovative financial controls, he’s always focused on driving collective success.
Outside of work, he enjoys traveling, tackling new challenges and staying ahead of industry trends.
Calvin Koon-Stack
Director of Advancement
Calvin is a storyteller with 15 years of experience in media and nonprofit consulting. Born and raised in South Carolina, he earned a Bachelors in Creative Writing from the University of South Carolina and a Masters in Communication Research from UC Davis. He moved to Washington, DC in 2015 to work in strategic communications, where he helped create Storytelling for Good -- a digital toolkit sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, designed to help nonprofits leverage the power of storytelling to achieve their missions. Calvin transitioned into advancement in 2017 when he joined Spark Point Fundraising. Over the past 8 years, Calvin grew his role from serving as a frontline grant writer and account manager, to leading a team of 11 writers and managing partnerships with nonprofits big and small. Altogether, he has helped more than 100 nonprofits find their voice and harness their story, working in areas such as poverty relief, health care, education, racial justice, arts and culture, youth development, and more. He has participated in TMC's "Managing to Change the World" training, hiked the Camino de Santiago (twice), and currently serves on the board of New Endeavors by Women, a DC-based nonprofit that helps women experiencing chronic homelessness create new futures for themselves and their children. Calvin currently lives in Knoxville, TN, where he can be found enjoying a cup of coffee, hiking in the Smokies, or trying a new recipe from the Rancho Gordo Bean Club.
Bridgette Yang
Communications Associate
Bridgette Yang is a Taiwanese American creative writer and film director based in LA/SF. Intertwining honest conversations with mundane whimsicality, she aims to weave wonder both onto the page and screen. Her writing is rooted in nostalgia, while her films illuminate new worlds conceptualized through endless daydreaming. She's performed poetry at the Getty Center alongside John Legend, SFJAZZ, USC Festival of Books, and many other events throughout California. Bridgette is also a storyteller with Lucky Rabbit Pictures, a film production company based in the Bay Area.
Paola Soyumi Ramírez Peña
Strategic Partnerships Manager
Paola Soyumi Ramírez Peña (she/they) is a poet, screenwriter, and sociologist on multiple planets. They are the oldest of four, a novice skater, and a mediocre baker. They are the host and creator of Somos Poetas, a virtual poetry workshop for people of all experience levels and a performing member of In Full Color. They are one-half of Local Fruit Podcast, an audiovisual call for imagination, justice, and hope. Paola is a graduate of The University of Kansas.
England Smith
Production Manager
England Smith is an interdisciplinary artist from Kansas that followed the yellow brick road to Oakland. They are a director of photography, graphic designer, production manager, and archivist. England's art coils the intimacy of breaking silence with the warmth of nostalgia.
Perla Barraza
Program Manager, Narrative & Applied Stories
Perla Vanesa Barraza is a formerly undocumented fronteriza and theater artist coming from Tucson, AZ. Originally from Tijuana, Mexico, she migrated to the United States when she was 3 years old.
Perla’s activism began on the theater stage when Perla was cast in the Borderlands Theater Production of El Ausente. The play was about a father’s disappearance after crossing the Mexico-United States border and the impact his absence had on his family. The story mirrored her own father’s incarceration and deportation and for the first time Perla felt she was telling an important story. Perla became critically aware of the importance of narrative through her theater work and community organizing. She believes in the power of storytelling both as a means of healing and as a way to push back on harmful narratives; Perla aspires to create theater that uplifts and serves her immigrant community.
Perla holds a B.A. in Theater Arts from Mills College and has performed in multiple Rolling World Premieres including Richard Montoya’s Nogales (Campo Santo), Hilary Betis’ Ghost of Lote Bravo, Milta Ortiz’ MAS (Borderlands Theater), and Paul Flores’ Pilgrim St/Stockton 21 (Youth Speaks). Most recently she has stepped into the new roles of Assistant Director and Stage Manager on Yosimar Reyes' Prieto (The Living Word Project and With You Productions) and Assistant Director on Luis Alfaro’s The Travelers (Magic Theater).
Leticia Guzman
Teaching Artist
Leticia Guzman is a chicana poet, educator and organizer from Hayward, California. Serving as the 2024 Hayward Poet Laureate. She has been writing and performing poetry for over 10 years, Slammed as a youth poet, reaching International Competition, Brave New Voices in 2017. Leticia is now coaching a team to compete internationally. Her work is featured in “Between my body and the air” poetry anthology, PANDERISTAS media, and The Offing Literary Magazine. She's a teaching artist at Youth Speaks, her nephews favorite aunty and a taco bell enthusiast. Leticia uses spoken word to empower her inner child, document her family's history and share her story in hopes to uplift and empower others.
Mubeenah Wishnoff
Teaching Artist
Mubeenah is a 23 year old Oakland Native and multidisciplinary artist, facilitator, teaching artist, healer, community organizer, and entrepreneur. As an alumni and active participant of Youth Speaks, she is passionate about bridging the path of survival to freedom through God, the embodiment of faith, indigenous healing, and the arts with the use of the abundance of our Divinely gifted creative abilities as paths to expansive healing and full spectrum access to our abundance and liberation for ourselves and one another. Prodigal beginnings, she began writing poetry at 5 years old and embarked on a lifelong expansive multidisciplinary artist journey that includes writing, spoken word, music, sustainable modest fashion and continues to expand into film and photography. Her pedagogy believes it is our Divine accountability and our ancestral responsibility to get free. She prays whatever frees her frees everyone and it is our mission to embody our Divine calling through our faith, community, and multidisciplinary creative gifts to get free by any means necessary. Her pedagogy expands to embodying the practice and affirmation of freeing all ghetto children worldwide, and that it is our spiritual and revolutionary duty to ourselves and one another to get spiritually, creatively, and materially free for the liberation of the people and the land as a local and global community until our Return.
Brandon Gagante
Teaching Artist
Brandon Gagante (he/him) is a Filipino American storyteller born and raised in San Jose, who uses he/him pronouns. He works at YouthSpeaks as a teaching artist, has hosted Lyricist Lounge, the student-centered open mic at USF, and is an independent Director and Filmmaker under the name of Kuya B. The stories he creates illustrate everything he carries with him, the lessons he learned, his people, his culture, his intentions in life, and more. He writes in the way he wishes to live: without fear.
