Kier Blake (they/them)

For 8 years, Kier has worked as a community-based fieldwork and education advisor in Kenya, occupied Palestine, Lebanon, and amerika. Through various modes of community engagement and co-design, Kier supports the development of Start:Empowerment's holistic education platforms and projects which promote long-term sustainable educational and cultural growth in the communities S:E serves.

Based on unceded, occupied Lenape-Munsee Canarsie land (Brooklyn, New York)

My Story

Contributions

Kier is one of the co-creators of S:E and handles the org's legal health, board and advisory management, public partnerships, community outreach, event planning, fundraising, and NYC on-the-ground organizing and program building.

A graduate of Nonprofit and Collective Organizational Management & Development (NYU '20) they contributed to community-based fieldwork and education advising in Kenya with SID Canada, occupied Palestine with LEAD Palestine, Lebanon with Jusoor Syria, and amerika with various initiatives from Culver City's City Council's My Brother's Keeper Challenge to conferences like Frontier 2018. Their college career culminated in becoming the only 2020-21 NYC Urban Fellow to serve under an agency Chief Operating Officer (COO) in their cohort.

Nowadays, Kier is working as a disruptive strategist and environmental justice organizer while pursuing an MSc in Environmental Policy and Sustainability with a focus in Environmental Justice at The New School. Their focus is on:

Pushing Start:Empowerment's educational bounds by researching how decolonial, land-based environmental education is cultivated on a societal level in non-Western contexts and
Understanding how Start:Empowerment's work can not only foster socially and environmentally just practices but also spaces that are also radically imaginative, as well as ecologically restorative.

In their free time, they are most likely organizing mutual aid or with local causes like #NoNBKPipeline and various East Flatbush Community Fridge networks, attending classes for fun, and/or dancing with friends.