Activist council
These folks are the decision-makers behind our Action Grants (10k+ EUR), they have inherited the grant-making processes we’ve been refining over the past 6 years, but they will shape them over the next two years (starting June 2022). Alongside word-of-mouth & peer-to-peer suggestions, the council also scout and recommends new social movements, activist collectives and campaigns for us to fund. Their mandates are 2 years, after which other activists working across Europe will take their place.
Tap on the images for more information about the activist council members.
Binta Jammeh wears many hats – educator, facilitator, organizer, social entrepreneur, and mental health advocate – in support of community-led initiatives focused on reducing social and environmental inequalities. She has 10+ years experience working internationally on issues related to digital literacy, educational, social, and economic inclusion of marginalized communities, capacity and community building, and intercultural communication. Her current work focuses on helping organizations build citizen-led movements for social change, training youth leaders and activists in campaigning, community building and mobilization, and building networks of peer learning, support, and empowerment for marginalized communities.
She’s currently based in Paris, and when she’s not working, she can be found trying to perfect her recipe for the world’s best chocolate chunk cookie, listening to podcasts, and volunteering with grassroots anti-racist and feminist organizations.
Maria Francesca De Tullio is researcher in Constitutional Law (Federico II University of Naples). She also worked at University of Antwerp, within the project Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities, and fulfilled a research residency at Université Paris 2. She authored a book on *Substantial Equality and New Dimensions of Political Participation.* Other main areas of research are: counter-terrorism and states of emergency, competition law on the Internet, the collective dimension of privacy in the age of big data.
She is an activist in l’Asilo as well as in Italian and European commons movements, with special reference to creative use of law and negotiations with administrations. She is also a part of the Council of audit on public debt of the city of Naples. She likes sports, nature, and explorations.
Nat Skoczylas (they/them, Poland 1987) is an artist, activist, anarchist and researcher living in Berlin. They work and live collectively, exercising some of the utopian ideas drawn from anarchy, feminism, ecologies, speculative fiction and their own experience growing up in a post-socialist, poor, and way too religious part of Poland. Their practices span community building, organising, writing, game design, performance, as well as fermentation and food as a tool for storytelling and social transformation. Nat is currently busy thinking of acid communism as a basis for new politics and relating and fighting landlords in Berlin.
Ilaj is a member of the Ulex Project‘s core team and is part of the Council in their collective identity as a limb of the Ulex Project. Ilaj is an experienced trainer, facilitator and networker investing most of their skills, gifts and time into supporting social movements in Europe, mostly through holding (educational) spaces on topics such as group dynamics, the practice of solidarity and empowerment, psycho-social resilience, working with trauma and repression. They are passionate about working with the body as a radical means of deconstructing systems of oppression. They are a pole dancer and dream of becoming a roller skater but the latter is difficult as there is no asphalt where they live. They are mainly connected to LGBTQI+, queer and feminist movements in Eastern and Southern Europe.
Kevin Buckland (he/him) is an artivist who has spent the past 14 years working with the international climate justice movement to lift up the role of art, creativity and artists in creating change. He engages in a wide diversity of creative tactics – from papermaché canoes to direct-action performances, from cardboard circuses to giant inflatables – to harness the power of culture and creativity to open space for new ideas and politics. He is the co-founder of the Gastivists Collective and the Artivist Network, and is currently organising to create La Casa dels Futurs: a permanent climate justice center in Barcelona, where he is based. He is a painter, novelist, performer, puppet-maker, and child-herder who thinks how we do things can be as important as what we do.
Živilė is a community organiser and a facilitator, driven by localised problems – periodically, frustration – and being helpful whenever or wherever needed. Her early activism was instigated by learning about climate justice, discovering tools on Beautiful Trouble, and meeting amazing activists throughout the journey. These were the most effective sources of her motivation. Gradually, her focus evolved to being more based on intersectionality and finding common points of solidarity within activist circles, who work on different issues. This has led to network Y?! coming about – starting as a cross-issue festival, Y?! is an activist participatory fund based in the Baltic countries. Currently staying in Lithuania and running a local energy poverty project, facilitating events for LGBTQ+ youth, and working on a campaign for human-friendly planning of the city, which is threatened to be taken over by large corporations. Živilė loves board games, camping, exploring outside, swimming and binge-watching when there is time.
Joris is a writer and editor originally from the Netherlands, but based in Istanbul, Turkey for nearly a decade. From 2013 until the magazine’s recent closure, Joris was Managing Editor at ROAR Magazine, a journal of the radical imagination covering grassroots struggles for real democracy across the globe. Joris is a dedicated bookwurm, avid cyclist and somewhat of a history buff. Migration issues and border violence are part and parcel of life on the outskirts of Fortress Europe, so it is no surprise that these topics appear on top of his political agenda, alongside Indigenous rights, anti-colonial resistance and grassroots democratic alternatives. As we confront the juggernaut of global capitalism, the redistribution of means and resources is one small but crucial step towards a leveling of the playing field which increases our odds in the fight for our collective survival.
Mother of two beautiful boys, journalist, translator and cultural producer. Since 2005, I dedicate myself to issues related to African and Afro-descendant communities in Portugal and Germany. In 2015, I founded Afrolis – Cultural Association, an organization aimed at promoting cultural expression and building new identity narratives of African descendants through identification, research and knowledge sharing. I am also a curator, researcher and consultant for several initiatives in the academic, media and social movements fields. I love the sun, flowers and the sea.
