October 2018 Newsletter

Kade Cahe, Member Engagement & Leadership Coordinator

Kade Cahe, pronounced KD K, is a first generation Black Dominican Queer GNC Masculine of Center person from the Bronx. Kade often dreams, schemes, and acts to dismantle anti-blackness, transphobia, ableism, gender-based violence, the prison industrial complex, and capitalism, to start, while creating radical restorative futures within our communities. They organize through the BYP100 New York City chapter as one of the Healing and Safety co-chairs to bring holistic liberation to all black people so that we can all be free.

Kade utilizes their background as critical educator, organizer, and leadership trainer, on Swipe it Forward! actions to help end broken window policing, #SayHerName events, and when integrating wellness into organizing spaces. Before working at ALP, Kade was a Senior Trainer at the Posse Foundation where they recruited students for Posse’s full-tuition scholarship program, led workshops on leadership, identity, power, and support to ensure that students were persisting in their goals.

Kade is excited to work and grow with ALP to further merge their organizing and leadership development within our LGBTSTGNC people of color community.

Maxwell Scales, Director of Development & Grassroots Fundraising

Maxwell Scales serves as the Audre Lorde Project's Director of Development and Grassroots Fundraising, focusing on organizing resources for the movement. Born and raised in the South, Max has been living/learning/working in NYC for over 15 years. He most recently worked at ALP's sibling org, the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, as the Director of Development and Finance, managing institutional funding and daily financial operations. Max has a decade of experience as a professional fundraiser, including development work at Lambda Legal, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), focusing on events, planned giving, direct mail, and major gifts. He is a Certified Non-Profit Accounting Professional. Max is into intersectional lenses, wealth redistribution, and spreadsheet shortcuts. Maxwell identifies as black/queer/transmasc and uses he/him/his pronouns.

Rumi Akong, Interim TransJustice Coordinator

Rumi is a Black and mixed race nonbinary andro-queer kid from Queens. They are blessed to spend most of their time lifting up the rich survival autotheory offered in the stories that comrades at the Audre Lorde Project and scholars of color across CUNY institutions exchange in our respective movements. They labor in solidarity with economically disenfranchised, neurotypical, indigenous / diasporic people of color and centers these communities in their studies and vision for the future of liberatory therapeutic practice for chronically traumatized peoples. Among other roles, they have served as a group facilitator, community liaison, and health and wellness educator for LGBTQIA communities since 2013. They relish in arts-driven, earth-honoring collaborative program development and hosting safer, informed and generative spaces for cross-community mobilization.

Rumi earned dual Bachelor’s degrees in Psychology and English at the University at Buffalo and knows a lot of words, but also believes that when it comes to expressing a robustly complex and nuanced reality, human experience tends to supersedes every single one. Rumi is a self-described ‘one-part shapeless, formless couch potato, two-parts amateur outdoorsman and survivalist, full-on earth advocate’. If Rumi was any more a fantastical creature, they would definitely be a gnome. Rumi answers to they, he and Gnomeo.

Janhavi Pakrashi, Communications Coordinator

Janhavi (aka DJ Tikka Masala) joins the Audre Lorde Project with the intention of bringing 14 years of nightlife promotional strategy, and 7 years of instructional media design with teaching and learning online at the Pratt Institute, in addition to 2 years at Astraea, learning about global and intersectional feminisms.She/they also work at Henrietta Hudson, the oldest lesbian bar in new york city, and one of the last 5 in the country, as a resident DJ and previously social media director.

With an academic background in documentary film, Janhavi’s focus is telling stories using a variety of media, including photography, film, audio, social media, and music. Janhavi’s sensibilities about movement building come from a place of connecting collective historical narratives with the new perspectives required to catalyze growth. They are also on the first ever nightlife advisory board of the mayor’s office, and spend a lot of time thinking about how to make the same spaces where people find their queer identities in community promote self-determination inclusivity.