Our Board
Mychal Johnson
Founding Member and Advisory Board Member
Mychal is a community-based advocate for environmental, economic and social justice in the South Bronx. He is a co-founder of South Bronx Unite and a founding member of the Mott Haven-Port Morris Community Land Stewards, where is also a board member.
He serves on the board of directors of the NYC Community Land Initiative (NYCCLI), the Bronx Council for Environmental Quality, and the Community Advisory Board of Columbia University’s NIEHS Center for Environmental Health in Northern Manhattan. Mychal was also appointed as a civil society voting member of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Open Space Committee. He has been a member of Bronx Community Board 1 and was notably selected by the United Nations to serve as one of 38 global civil society appointees to the historic UN Climate Summit in 2014.
He is a long-time activist organizing for greater access to open green space, truly affordable housing, a healthier quality of life, and community-focused development that supports rather than displaces neighborhood residents.
Melissa Barber, MD
Founding Member and Advisory Board Member
Dr. Melissa Barber is the author of “Thirty Days of Thanks: A Journey Towards Healing and Deliverance” and the CEO of the consulting company, Thirty Days of Thanks. She completed her medical training at the Latin American School of Medicine (LASM) or La Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina (ELAM) in Havana, Cuba, which focuses on community and social medicine. She is currently one of the Principal Investigators of the COVID-19 Community Pesquisa Project, which seeks to investigate the impacts of COVID-19 on South Bronx communities. She is a co-founder of South Bronx Unite and a founding Executive Board Member of the Mott Haven-Port Morris Community Land Stewards, the first ever community land trust in The Bronx. She also serves on the Community Advisory Board of Columbia University’s NIEHS Center for Environmental Health in Northern Manhattan.
Dr. Barber is an ambassador and advocate for the international maternal-infant organization, the Birthing Project USA: the Underground Railroad for New Life, where she promotes health and wellness, and fights for the lives of women and babies of color. Dr. Barber is a member and co-organizer for the Bronx Parents Autism Support Circle, which educates, provides resources, and supports families with loved ones on the autism spectrum. Dr. Barber oversees 6am Morning Glory Prayer, a ministry of Jesus Juice. Her passion for youth of color led Dr. Barber to work as Program Coordinator for the ELAM Medical School scholarship program for ten years, facilitating the gifting of free medical education scholarships to over 300 BIPOC students.
Dr. Barber is a single mother to an amazingly gifted autistic daughter and currently resides where she was born, in the best place on this planet, the South Bronx. Her dreams include creating a one-stop shop, social medicine clinic/wellness center that will bring holistic healing to her community. She would also love to use her book to heal and deliver people from health and social inequities.
Monxo Lopez
Founding Member and Advisory Board Member
Monxo López is a museum curator, urban thinker, educator, cartographer, and South Bronx-based environmental and urban justice activist. He is currently a Mellon Foundation fellow at the curatorial department of the Museum of the City of New York. He has taught Latinx Studies and political science in Hunter College, and was a Mapping Fellow at the Design Trust for Public Spaces.
Monxo is a founding member of South Bronx Unite and the Mott Haven-Port Morris Community Land Stewards, the first local community land trust in The Bronx. He also currently serves as a board member of the Cooper Square Community Land Trust in the Lower East Side.
He is regularly invited to lecture and collaborate in urban planning and community organizing courses, and in architectural studios and juries for institutions such as Syracuse University, MIT, CUNY’s City College, Penn State, and Pratt Institute.
He holds a Ph.D. in political science from CUNY’s Graduate Center, and an MA from Université Laval in Québec, Canada. His academic research revolves around spatiality, mapping, social justice, political theory, and Latino communities. Monxo’s political writings on spatial and social justice have been published in Salon.com, LatinoRebels, and NACLA, among other media outlets. His activist work has been profiled by The New York Times, UrbanOmnibus, and Corriere della Sera.
He was born and grew up in Puerto Rico, and lives in Mott Haven, the South Bronx.
Libertad O. Guerra
Founding Member and Advisory Board Member
Guerra is an urban anthropologist, curator, and cultural organizer and producer with vast arts management experience. She specializes in startup phase and strategic turnaround of community based cultural organizations using an intersectional approach. She has led the creation of incubation spaces for Latinx cultural producers and educators in NYC. Her academic research and symposia have focused on Puerto Rican, Latinx, and NYC’s social-artistic movements and cultural activism in im/migrant urban settings. Several of her exhibitions have been featured in Art Net best exhibitions of the year, and included in the New York Times list of 10 Galleries to Visit Now on the Lower East Side. In 2020, she became the Executive Director of The Clemente Soto Velez Cultural & Education Center in downtown Manhattan and was recently awarded the Mellon Foundation grant for New Director’s Vision.
Guerra is a longtime resident of Mott Haven in the South Bronx, where she co-founded the environmental justice group, South Bronx Unite (SBU), in 2012. As a member of the board of the Mott Haven-Port Morris Land Stewarts, Guerra has collaborated in community-based participatory research along with multiple academic partners, and participated in extensive local, citywide and national coalition building efforts on themes of environmental racism, and advocacy for community land trusts and cultural equity.
Her publications include essays in The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest, the edited volume New York-Berlin: Kulturen in der Stadt, and in FIELD: a Journal of Socially-Engaged Art Criticism.
She is part of the Art Against Austerity working group with Social Practice Queens, served as adviser for one of the Design Trust’s Public for All initiatives, is a member of the Naturally Occurring Cultural District network (NOCD-NY), is a Ford Foundation 2020-21 grantee for the JustXChanges initiative, and a recipient of the DeVos Institute Global Arts Management Fellowship (2019-2021).
Raymond Figueroa, Jr.
Advisory Board Member
Ray is a co-founder and the director of the Brook Park Youth Farm Alternatives-to-Incarceration program for formerly incarcerated youth in the South Bronx. He is also the president of the New York City Community Garden Coalition where he is engaged in community organizing and policy advocacy for regulatory reforms that can improve the land tenure status of community gardens within the city’s historically marginalized BIPOC communities.
Ray is a member of the Sustainable Environmental Systems Faculty at the Graduate Center for Planning and the Environment at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture. He is also a Taconic Faculty Fellow with the Pratt Center for Community Development where he coordinates a collaborative critical environmental areas/participatory action research initiative with the CUNY Graduate Center, the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Earth Justice, and local community residents, organizing efforts for the purposes of “greening” municipal land use decision-making processes that can allow for regenerative and resilient community development via a hyper-local, green infrastructure-based food system.
He has served as a consultant and contributor to publications, governments, research institutions, and foundations, including with the American Planning Association, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, MIT Community Innovators Lab, Columbia University – Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, National Academy of Medicine, Design Trust for Public Space, New York City Council, NYC Mayor’s Urban Agriculture Task Force, Community Food Funders’ Affinity Group, and Nevin Cohen/Kristn Reynold’s book, "Beyond the Kale: Urban Agriculture and Social Justice Activism in New York City”