Abrima Erwiah has worked for some of the most respected brands in the world, including Bottega Veneta, Hermes, and John Lobb, among others. She has been an advisor to the United Nations International Trade Center, served as a mentor under the Kering Foundation for Women’s Dignity & Rights, and taught in the School of Fashion at Parsons.
She is also the co-founder of Studio 189, alongside actress Rosario Dawson, which is an artisan produced fashion lifestyle brand and social enterprise that is a CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund recipient, and the CFDA Lexus Fashion Initiative for Sustainability award winner.
Abrima is the Director of the Joseph and Gail Gromek Institute for Fashion Business at Parsons School of Design in NYC.

Ryan Rising is a community organizer and social-ecological design facilitator. Bringing principles and practices from two decades of grassroots movement work in direct action, food sovereignty, ecological regeneration, and land reclamation, Ryan teaches Permaculture Design Certification courses and how-to workshops in collaborative group dynamics and collective decision making. 

Ryan is the co-founder and co-director of the worker self-directed nonprofit Permaculture Action Network that has mobilized over 15,000 people to hands-on days of direct action throughout 26 US states and 64 cities, building out hubs of land-based autonomy and ecological regeneration -  urban farms, community gardens, public food forests, and collective living & movement spaces. 

Ryan is a co-founder of the Omni Commons, a community center and collective of collectives in Oakland, CA; and of the Gill Tract Community Farm, an urban farm distributing thousands of pounds of free food and medicine annually. Ryan recently served as the Executive Director of Rhize, a non-profit organization growing and distributing free food through mutual aid projects. 

A facilitator of the first General Assembly at Occupy Wall Street in NYC, and a facilitation trainer of Occupy San Francisco, Ryan has brought consensus building and liberatory design through a myriad of organizations including the NonProfit Democracy Network, Ecosystem Restoration Camps, the Thriving Resilient Communities Collaborative, and the NorCal Resilience Network.

Ryan has learned from the revolutionaries of Rojava, world renowned permaculture designers,  frontline organizers from NY to SF, and Zapatista organizers in Chiapas, and traces a historical line of organizing experience from the anti-war and anti-globalization protests of the early 2000’s through the Ferguson, Standing Rock, and George Floyd uprisings and to our current moment. 

Through organizing action days, Ryan has directly collaborated with dozens of high-profile musicians and performing artists, and multi-thousand attendee festivals, directing their audiences to engage with displaced and dispossessed communities of solidarity who are developing their own solutions to the intersecting ecological and economic crises we all face.