Advisory Board

Rosa Alicia Clemente is a Black-Puerto Rican woman born and raised in the Bronx, NY. She is an organizer, producer, independent journalist and scholar-activist.

In 2008, Clemente made herstory when she became the first Afro/Black-Latina to run for Vice-President of the United States on the Green Party ticket. She and her running mate, Cynthia McKinney are, to this date, the only women of color ticket in U.S. Presidential history.

However, her influential work neither started nor ended there. A media-maker, Clemente was recently an associate producer on Judas and the Black Messiah, a two-time Oscar-winning film by Shaka King, Charles D. King and Ryan Coogler about the betrayal of Black Panther Chairman Fred Hampton at the hands of FBI informant William O’Neal.

As an independent journalist, Clemente has provided on-the-ground coverage of the U.S. Navy’s withdrawal from Vieques, Puerto Rico, after 67 years of military control; the devastation and government failures in New Orleans and Mississippi after Hurricane Katrina; Black Lives Matters protests in Ferguson, Missouri, after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown and more. In 2017, days after Hurricane Maria ravaged Puerto Rico, Clemente organized a group of young Latinx media-makers to cover the destruction and its political implications through PR on the Map. Under the project, she produced multiple documentaries, photo series and articles. As a writer, Clemente isn’t scared to get personal, either. Her powerful first-person essays on Afro-Latinx identity, particularly her article Who is Black?, is read in classrooms across the country and has been translated into four different languages.

As president of Know Thy Self Productions, a full-service speakers bureau, production company and media consulting service, she has produced eight community activism tours. Through the production house, she also co-founded and was the national coordinator for the first-ever National Hip-Hop Political Convention in 2003, which helped bring together more than 3,000 activists to create and implement a political agenda for the hip-hop generation.

A fearless voice against injustice and violence, including high-profile perpetrators, Clemente has famously called out Russell Simmons on accusations of sexual violence as well as confronted rapper Rick Ross on his lyrics normalizing rape culture. A longtime champion for survivors in the hip-hop industry, it’s no surprise Clemente caught the attention of celebrities in the #MeToo movement. On January 8, 2018, she and six other women of color organizers joined Hollywood actresses at the Golden Globes Red Carpet as part of an initiative by Time’s Up and #MeToo. There, she spotlighted sexual harassment and violence against women from Beverly Hills to the South Bronx.

Currently completing her PhD at the W.E.B. DuBois Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Clemente’s academic work centers national liberation struggles inside the U.S. with a specific focus on the Young Lords Party, the Black Panther Party, Black and brown liberation movements of the ‘60s and ‘70s as well as the effects of COINTELPRO (Counterintelligence Program) on such movements. Clemente is also one of her generation’s leading scholars on the issues of Afro/Black-Latina/Latino/Latinx identity. In 2020, she created the Black Diasporic Organizing Project, a nonprofit dedicated to combating anti-Blackness within the wider Latina, Latino and Latinx community.

Dr. Harper has a PhD in the social sciences, with emphasis in intersectionality, anti-racism and racial-gender inclusion/equity. She holds a MA in Educational Technologies (emphasis in racial-gender inclusion/equity in technology) from Harvard University, where she received the Dean’s Award for her masters thesis work on how racial-gender privilege operates in cyberspace forums. She earned her BA in feminist geography from Dartmouth College and received the Innovative Thesis award for her work on heterosexism in rural geographies. She has 15+ years career experience as a diversity, equity, and inclusion expert, ranging from curriculum development, to conference planning, to research and reporting, to publishing books and articles, to workshop design and facilitation, to recruitment and retention, to critical content editing, to strategic consulting. 

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Dr. Harper is the co-founder of an innovative inclusion, diversity, and equity consulting firm called Critical Diversity Solutions. They merge critical theory and methods + human centered storytelling + action planning and metrics. She also recently founded Black Zephyr, Inc in order to focus on Afrofuturism and Black Reparative Justice as an equity catalyst.

Dr. Harper created and edited the ground-breaking anthology, Sistah Vegan: Black Women Vegans Speak On Food, Identity, Health, and Society. Her most recently published book, Scars: A Black Lesbian Experience in Rural White New England (Brill 2014) interrogates how systems of oppression and power impact the life of the only Black teenager living in an all white and working class rural New England town.

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In 2025, Dr. Harper’s latest second novel, Seeds of Sankofa, will be published. Listen to her Farm Sanctuary Inaugural address about her latest novel, racism in the food system, writing black food futures through Afro-futurism, and why we should be saying 'food apartheid' vs. 'food desert'.

 Gwenna Hunter, founder of Vegans of Los Angeles and creator of the first Vegan Food Bank in the city, made history in May 2022 with starting the first vegan food bank in Los Angeles, California and also as the first Black woman to establish a brick-and-mortar Vegan food bank in the country. Her journey into veganism was sparked by a supernatural awakening, a dream where she shared consciousness with a cow, realizing the depth of their emotions and awareness as with all animals. Since adopting a vegan lifestyle in February 2016, Gwenna has been a dedicated activist, working to reshape beliefs around animal treatment and food choices. Through the Vegans of Los Angeles Food Bank, she aims to provide not just food abundance as a birth right but also hope, light, and dignity to our communities, partnering with Hope on Union to increase food security. 

Francis Peña is Executive Director of Grassroots Artists MovEment (G.A.ME) – Black VegFest co-founder, organizing committee member residing in Harlem NYC. In college he helped establish G.A.ME to bring essential resources to artists and Black and Brown communities. In 2018, he played a vital role in launching the first annual Black VegFest in Brooklyn, NY. Providing logistical and volunteer support to the festival and organization, he helps ensure that Black VegFest programs and events operate successfully. As Treasurer of G.A.ME, he is responsible for the fiduciary management and financial oversight of the non-profit organization. An organizer and volunteer who works in low-income & affordable housing, Francis’ advocacy is driven by the belief that we all deserve the best, dignified life.   

Naijha Wright-Brown is a 2021 Baltimore Business Journal Enterprising Women of Excellence Honoree.  A native New Yorker, raised in the South Bronx, Naijha is a people person and loves to make connections.  Naijha was introduced to gardening, farming, environmentalism, sustainability, and the basics of eating healthy while spending summers in Massachusetts as a teenager.  Naijha has an MBA in Business from the University of Phoenix and is a successful serial entrepreneur.  The thought of owning a restaurant never crossed her mind until she relocated to Baltimore in 2005 and met her fellow Verizon Wireless co-worker, now husband, Gregory Brown.

Naijha is a partner and the Marketing Director for The Land of Kush, VeganSoul Bistro, and co-creator of Vegan SoulFest and Maryland Vegan Restaurant Week. She is the Executive Director of the Black Veg Society, a non-profit organization whose mission is mission is to educate predominantly Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) communities, on the benefits of holistic living, the plant-based diet, and veganism. Naijha, also, has a digital talk show, Naijha Speaks, that helps people on a mission to find their vegan soul!