Category Archives: Behind The Scenes

The Trans Justice Funding Project is pleased to announce its 2015 community-led grantmaking panel facilitators!

2015 TJFP Facilitator, Andrea Jenkins

TJFP facilitators are essential to our community-led grantmaking process.  They are committed to guiding panelists towards making grant awards rooted in our core values and work tirelessly to facilitate panelists moving money across the U.S.

In 2013 Nico Amador signed on to become TJFP’s very first facilitator.  In 2014, Nico (our facilitator hero) came back for more.

And in 2014, the fabulously brilliant Andrea Jenkins came on board as a community panelist.

For the 2015 cycle Nico and Andrea will join forces as co-facilitators, both drawing from years of organizing experience and expertise.

2015 TJFP Facilitator, Nico Amador

Obviously, TJFP couldn’t possibly be any happier about that.

Please continue for facilitator bios!

Andrea Jenkins is an Award winning poet and writer. Most recently was awarded a Bush Fellowship and a Fellowship in the Cultural Community Leadership Institute at Intermedia Arts and sponsored by the Bush Foundation and named a fellow in the Many Voices Fellowship at the Playwrights Center. Last year she won the Verve Grant for Spoken Artist at Intermedia Arts and the Naked Stages Grant for Emerging Performance Artist at Pillsbury House Theatre. She is a Givens Foundation Fellow working Amiri Baraka and J. Otis Powell! She has won the Loft Mentor Series in 2002 and the Napa Valley Writers Conference scholarship in 2003.Andrea earned her Masters of Science, Community Economic Development –Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, New Hampshire, a Certificate, University of St. Thomas, Community Leadership Institute, and Bachelors of Science, Human Services / Interpersonal Communications – Metropolitan State University and has a MFA in Creative Writing at Hamline University.

She has performed with The Outward Spiral, Mama Mosaic and many others. Andrea has self-published three chapbooks of poems called “tributaries: poems celebrating black history, “Pieces of a Scream: New and Selected Poems”, and “The “T” is NOT Silent”. She currently is co-curator of the Queer Voices Reading Series at Intermedia Arts. She has been published in several anthologies including, “Gender Outlaws Two: The Next Generation”, “When We Become Weavers: Queer Female Poets on the Midwestern Experience” edited by, Kate Lynn Hibbard and “The Naked I: Wide Open” and “The Naked I: Inside Out”, edited by 20% Theater and most recently in “Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Civil Rights: A Public Policy Agenda for Uniting a Divided America” edited by Dr. Wallace Swan.

Andrea works as a Senior Policy Aide to City Councilmember Elizabeth Glidden, serves as Board Chair at Intermedia Arts and lives in Minneapolis, MN.

Nico Amador grew up in California and is now a trainer, organizer and writer based in Philadelphia, PA. Nico got his start as a trainer working with youth around issues of oppression and leading workshops on the impacts of militarism and the prison industrial complex on people of color. As part of the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s Nonviolent Youth Collective, Nico helped to train volunteers preparing to do human rights work in Colombia, led week-long retreats on nonviolence and social justice, and organized a California arts and education tour.

As part of Training for Change, Nico has led workshops in the US, Canada and Europe for groups such as Choice USA, Iraq Veterans Against the War, the Energy Action Coalition, Greenpeace, the National Youth Advocacy Coalition, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, the Earth Quaker Action Team, the New Sanctuary Movement, Prometheus Radio Project, and the Diverse City Fund.

Nico is also an experienced community organizer who has participated in grassroots efforts for prison abolition, urban farming, and keeping casinos out of residential neighborhoods. Most recently he led a campaign that successfully changed a policy that was causing harassment of transgender riders on Philadelphia’s public transportation system.

He has authored articles such as “Lessons from the Borders: Empowering Participants with Disabilities and Transgender Participants” and “Into the Streets! Training as a Tactic” and has published poetry in a few small journals and anthologies.

Please join us in welcoming Andrea and Nico.