The Strategy Circle coordinates with all other circles of the project, ensuring that we are working towards the project goals. The Strategy Circle creates, shares, and upholds the project goals and principles to all collaborators.
Strategy Circle
Collaborators
Shari Hersh
Environmental Justice Department Director
Shari Hersh is a community artist, organizer and facilitator. She has worked with Mural Arts Philadelphia for over twenty years where she established the Art Education Department, the Project Management Office, and founded the Restored Spaces Initiative and Trash Academy Program. She is currently the Director of the Environmental Justice Department.
Jeannine Kayembe Oro
Project Administrator
ig: @_Oro5_
Jeannine is a painter, writer, musical performer and co-founder of LifeDoGrow Urban Farm in North Philadelphia. They aim to transform their neighborhood into a safer space through healthy food and public art.
Jonathan Leibovic
Strategy Circle Convener
Jonathan is a diasporic organizer, educator, and musician whose work channels anxiety and despair into collaboration and hope. They live in Kingsessing, where they practice mutual aid, emergent strategy, and writing educational songs that also slap.
Gamar Markarian
Design Strategist
gamarworks.com
ig: @gamarmarkarian
Gamar is a highly curious researcher, design strategist, systems thinker, educator, storyteller, documentary filmmaker, and urbanist with a background in media, photography, urban design and landscape architecture. Prior to moving to New York City, Gamar co-founded Atelier Hamra, a landscape architecture studio in Beirut. She is currently an independent consultant collaborating with Philadelphia Murals Arts Program’s Environmental Justice Department.
Adriana Moran Garcia
Environmental Justice Department Fellow
Born and raised in East Harlem, Adriana is currently an FAO Schwarz fellow at Mural Arts in the Environmental Justice Department. She is a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with photography and collage, whose work explores themes of culture and nostalgia through color and tactility.
Dakota Plourde
Former Mural Arts Philadelphia employee and current employee of the Fairmount Park Conservancy, Dakota is of Passamaquoddy descent and engages in activism around environmental justice and indigenous sovereignty.
Ron Whyte
Consultant
fb: Deep Green Philly
tw: @DeepGreenPhilly
Ron Whyte is a Philadelphia-based environmental activist, advocate and consultant. Founded in 2011, his Deep Green Philly project is an alternative media resource inspired by the Deep Ecology movement. As project coordinator for Trash Academy (a project of Mural Arts Philadelphia’s Restored Spaces Initiative), he works with artists, students and local residents to find creative solutions for Philadelphia’s trash, litter and dumping crisis.
Emma Wu
Project Administrator
Emma Wu is an activist and writer living in Philadelphia, PA. Her work focuses on themes of collectivity, cultural transformation, and environmental justice. She is currently enrolled in Rutgers-Camden MFA in fiction writing.