Roan

Roan is a founding member of AORTA, an organizer, facilitator, writer, artist, and a parent of two small children. He is passionate about grassroots healing and cultural work, transformative justice, and anticapitalist, community-rooted models of resource sharing.

Roan first become politicized through queer, trans, and feminist anti-racist organizing as a teenager, and finds his political home in broad-based movements for liberation; he believes that all of our liberation is bound up together, and that true social change is a collective process. He was raised in an upper-middle class family, and has worked with Resource Generation to organize young lefty rich/class-privileged people to fight for wealth redistribution and reparations. His politics have been deeply shaped by economic justice organizing led by poor people, in particular the Bay Area based POOR Magazine, a poor and indigenous people-led grassroots organization doing economic justice work through art, organizing, media, education, and multigenerational community building.

In 2008, Roan co-founded the website Enough: The Personal Politics of Resisting Capitalism, an online space to share strategies for creating more just and economically sustainable movements and communities, with Dean Spade. He was named one of UTNE Reader’s 50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World in 2009 and is featured in the book Do It Anyway: Portraits of the Next Generation of Activists, from Beacon Press. His writing appeared regularly in the dearly departed Make/shift Magazine.

Roan is a queer, white, Jewish, transgender person with invisible disabilities. He grew up in Texas and New England, and currently lives with his family in Carrboro, NC.