Ashley Rodriguez Lantigua
Interim Special Projects Coordinator
ashley@youthinactionri.orgshe/her
Soy una orgullosa inmigrante, with Caribbean roots in the Dominican Republic. I started my journey at YIA as a youth at the age of 13 when I served in the student steering committee for the co-creation of 360 high school. I graduated from Classical High school and YIA in 2019. Since then, I have grown in my leadership efforts contributing to many paradigm shifts in the realms of Language Justice, Outdoor Equity, and dismantling School to Prison Pipelines. My time at YIA as a youth was transformative in that it moved me to recognize the power I behold as a young woman with civic responsibility and autonomy. It deeply informed my undergraduate journey at College of the Holy Cross where my studies were rooted in interdisciplinary praxis. I studied abroad in Ecuador where I was introduced to parallel community efforts to that of YIA, but expanded in rooting in spiritual self-knowledge, deep spiritual ecology and sacred ancestral remembering. The many experiences I’ve been privileged to have move me everyday to continue to challenge and decolonize oppressive structures of knowledge, and to create new cycles of intergenerational healing and being in my communities.
One of my greatest passions is the praxis of reimagining education, community organizing and activism through embodied remembering. I am a certified Kundalini and Hatha yoga teacher, and the yogic tools and philosophy serve my work and my communities as a sacred anchor to honor the body as a space of reclamation, memory, and revolution. In the fall, I will begin my graduate studies at Harvard Divinity School where I will continue to expand my own theologies and root in the sacred spiritual practices of my foremothers. I intend to actively align my thoughts, actions, and values with both local and global freedom movements as I know that our liberation is interconnected.
I love to dance (especially Anthony Santos’ old bachata songs), deeply laugh with my sisters, write and travel the world. I feel most at home by the ocean or the mountains.