By Mariko Powers

Mike Aguilar wakes to sweltering heat most summer morning  with his mind full of big ideas. His favorite books, including Be here Now by Ram Dass, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 years of Solitude, and The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander rest on his bookshelf, and a loudspeaker leans against the wall. He lives in a converted warehouse –part apartment, part community space—that he purchased and repurposed last year, with the help of his father and uncle. “We did everything,” he says, gesturing to the frosted-glass door bathrooms, the kitchenette and bar, the small garden and colorful tables out back.
 
His vision was to create a venue where community activists and creative types could gather and organize around issues and passions. Bodega Califas, as the clubhouse has been dubbed, is located two blocks from Skid Row – Los Angeles’s infamous hub of homelessness and militant policing. Yet less than five blocks away from there, the dirt-stained concrete buildings give way to downtown LA’s financial district, and the newly hip neighborhoods dotted with cold brew coffee shops and record stores. Burgeoning gentrification is nothing new to the city, but never before has it come so close to the largest homeless encampment in the United States, with an estimated population of 8,000 – 11,000 people. 
 
“We’re working on housing, but also on a number of laws that criminalize homelessness,” Mike says, detailing his volunteer work with the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN).  LA CAN activists organize meetings with affected communities, create materials for awareness, and are constantly at city hall and the police commission to try to change policy, Mike says.
 
“The police use Skid Row as a training ground for surveillance tactics,” he argues. “You see the brunt of police brutality here. There have been 20 police killings already this year. ”
 
At 29, Mike already has 10 years of experience in community organizing and human rights activism. He recalls his time as a CIEE Khon Kaen Development and Globalization student in Fall 2006 as a turning point in his organizing career.
 
“That was the first year that we envisioned the Human Rights Festival. I had never organized such a large event before,” Mike says of his semester final project. “That was the moment that I realized, if I put my mind to something and focused and made calls and worked with people to put something together, I could actually do it. That was the biggest moment of believing in myself.” 
 
He sustained the momentum from the Festival’s success when he returned to the University of San Francisco, where he cofounded a student group called "Back to da Roots" and interned with ENGAGE. After graduating, he returned to Khon Kaen as a CIEE Program Intern, and stayed on/returned as Intern Coordinator in 2009.
 
While serving as Intern Coordinator, Mike shared a house with members of Dao Din, a student activism and human rights group from Khon Kaen University, lived at the Dao Din human rights activist house and worked with a Dao Din leader to develop the Thai student movement, hosting workshops with youth groups in villages. He also wrote a number of proposals and a grant that helped Dao Din acquire the resources to become a recognized community center and organization. “It was originally during that time that we started discussing the trip to Mexico,” he says.
 
As a first-generation Mexican- American citizen, Mike says he has always seen connections between Mexican and Thai culture. “I would give workshops on the Zapatista movement in Mexico at Dao Din, and ever since Dao Din has expressed an interest in going to Mexico,” he says. That idea became a reality last November, when two representatives from Na Nong Bong village and two Dao Din leaders travelled to Oaxaca, Mexico, to discuss mining resistance strategies with local mine-affected communities.
 
The exchange was hosted by ENGAGE and Servicios Universitarios Y Redes de Conocimientos en Oaxaca A.C. (SURCO), a Mexican community organizing network. After Na Nong Bong anti-mining activists endured a violent attack led by the local mining company’s cronies in May 2014, Mike and ENGAGE worked for a year and a half to organize the Mexico trip. ENGAGE raised over $30,000 to fund the exchange, and Mike spearheaded a documentary of the meetings, which is currently in production.
 
“It’s a sad fact that Na Nong Bong lives with poisoned water, violence, and oppression – hopefully we inspired the delegates that went to bring back a positive mindset to fight for what they think is right. And of course, our end objective is to shut down the mine,” he says.
 
He points out that the Mexico exchange has had a lasting impact not only on the delegates that attended, but also on ENGAGE as an organization. ENGAGE successfully internationalized the Thai anti-mining struggle, he says, and in the process built up the network to include Thais locally in the United Sates and anti-mining activists in Mexico and Canada.
 
Mike is currently ENGAGE’s Network Coordinator; he monitors all the components of ENGAGE’s work and maintains relationships with CIEE Khon Kaen alumni around the US, as well as with colleagues and interns in Thailand. At last summer’s ENGAGE Convergence in Los Angeles, he helped organize an anti-coup protest action at the Royal Thai Consulate, and has staged an additional five actions since. He stresses that protesting on behalf of our Thai friends is critical at this time, because under military rule it has been difficult for Thais to organize in Thailand.
 
“What I’m trying to bring to ENGAGE is that we’re doing things that people want to be a part of,” he says. “The biggest issue that we’ve had is a bunch of privileged white kids that say ‘We’ve had a wonderful transformative experience,’ and then they go back to their normal lives. You forget about it. Some people do change and play an active role in society, but a large majority go back to whatever they were doing before.”
 
By staging periodic actions at the Royal Thai Consulate, Mike hopes he can fire up the network and involve the Thai population in Los Angeles, connecting activists on the ground. Currently, he is organizing the 15th anniversary of ENGAGE Convergence, which is planned for August 2016. He notes that a big goal for this year is to sustain the energy from last year’s successful solidarity programs, and to plan for the future of ENGAGE.
 
“The message I’m trying to send is, here is a network available for people to go to if they want to be involved, and we’re active,” he says. “Be a part of fighting for issues in your local community, but stay connected to the Thai struggle. All the beautiful people that you met – there’s a network that maintains solidarity with them.”

Written by Zoe Swartz

Bree O’Keane takes her role as a family member seriously and always visits her community in Non Somboon when she comes back to Thailand. Personal relationships have been at the heart of Bree’s extensive community organizing work. 



It’s a balmy Friday night in downtown Khon Kaen, and Decha Premrudelert and Bamroon Bamrungsuk –two long-time community activists and mentors to ENGAGE—sit  down for their weekly dinner at their regular table at 89 Pad Thai, a restaurant at the lively intersection of a small market and the train tracks. Bamroon pours a bottle of Chang over ice in his glass, as Decha spreads out appetizers of boiled peanuts and bananas on their table. Portraits of notable world leaders, including Abraham Lincoln, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Mao Zedong adorn the wall behind them. With these two old friends is Bree O’Keane, a thirty-three-year old woman from Rochester, New York. Although Bree stands out at the table in terms of appearance, her relaxed demeanor mirrors that of her elderly friends. She is at ease joining the pair in conversation, in Thai or English, on topics ranging from the evolution of education to envisioning a post-capitalistic world.
                                                                                                                                     
Bree has known these men and been involved in the Isaan NGO movement for a long time. She first came to Khon Kaen in 2003 as a student on the CIEE: Khon Kaen Development and Globalization program, and then immediately stayed on as a community intern for the next eight months. “I felt like my [student] experience was just the beginning of something. I wanted to dig in on a deeper level,” Bree explains. Initially, Bree planned to return to the University of Colorado to finish her degree and then come back to Thailand. “I talked to Dave [the Center Director of CIEE: Khon Kaen] and he said that people say they’ll come back all the time, but then go back into their world and don’t,” Bree recalls. “He said, ‘If you really want to stay, you should just stay,’ and that’s exactly what I did.”

"I felt like my experience was just the beginning of something."
 
Since then, Bree has truly made Thailand part of her world. She has built meaningful relationships, worked with communities and NGOs, and has applied her learning from Thailand to her activism in the United States. Currently, Bree is on the ENGAGE Board of Peers, looking after the logistical and behind-the-scenes aspects of the organization. Bree became involved in ENGAGE in 2003, two years after it was founded, and contributed to its mission development as well as two of its major programs – the Fair Trade Jasmine Rice Tour and the Access to Medicine Tour. While living in San Francisco, where the ENGAGE office was located at the time, Bree became particularly involved in the Access to Medicine Tour. The tour brought a professor, an NGO leader, and a  villager living with HIV from Thailand to the US to educate Americans about how Thai-US trade agreements affect access to medicines for Thai people who have HIV/AIDS. The tour visited twelve different venues, including universities, hospitals, and community centers, and focused on how price inflation through trade agreements makes it impossible for villagers to purchase life-preserving HIV/AIDS medicines.
 
Educational tours were not a new concept to Bree – she  first organized one as a Community Intern for CIEE in Non Somboon, a village fighting a potash mine. Community members organized a tour to another village that had been involved in salt mining for years. The natural environment in the salt-mining community had already undergone significant destruction, so it was valuable for villagers in Non Somboon to see what could happen to their community and exchange resistance strategies. Educational exchange has been a common thread in Bree’s work and she believes that tours are important to ENGAGE’s mission. “Exchange isn’t exchange if it only goes one way,” Bree says. “Students bringing the spirit of what they learned back to the States is a type of personal exchange, but there is really something to be said for having human cross-country exchange too.”
 
While Bree has done impressive organizing work in the US – including starting the first food cooperative at the University of California Berkeley and serving as the Deputy Director for the Alliance for Biking & Walking in Washington DC, her profound personal relationships keep pulling her back to Thailand. Bree considers her host family in Non Somboon to be her family, and she has been back to see them eight times over the past thirteen years. “There are expectations to being a family member,” Bree says earnestly. Three years ago Bree’s host father passed away, and on her most recent trip to Thailand she helped the family plan the merit making ceremony. She shared in the responsibility of watching grandchildren and choosing activities for the ceremony, just like biological members of the family.
 
Bree has continued to take her connections to heart, no matter where she finds herself living. In 2008, Bree returned to Khon Kaen to work Khon Kaen Education Initiative – an organization founded by Decha and the Khon Kaen Municipality to make local English teaching curriculums more experiential. As it turned out, the people she lived with at this time influenced her current endeavor, starting a fair-trade tea company. “I was living by the lake in downtown Khon Kaen with Ajaan (teacher) Adisack [a former CIEE field coordinator],” Bree remembers. “He and a few other people founded a teahouse that served as a meeting place for NGOs and students. There was even an activist library on site.” The teahouse fostered an exchange of ideas and knowledge, and Bree says she saw first hand how “tea can bring people together, generate conversation, and get people to slow down a bit.”
 
Today, Bree and a few close friends are in the early stages of founding Open Heart Tea Company, which aims to bridge Shambala Buddhist centers to communities in Thailand through direct holistic trade and one-on-one relationships. Shambala is a lineage of Tibbetian Buddhism with centers throughout the US. Tea drinking is a frequent practice at Shamabala centers, yet they mostly buy tea from mainstream big brand importers, Bree says. She and her business partners believe that they can help Shamabala centers bring mindfulness to their tea purchases. “The experience of tea sharing is in almost every culture,” she continues, “so it’s something that I care about and is important to me.”

"Living in a world where there is so much emphasis on ‘what are we going to do?’ my experience has brought me to think that it is more about ‘how are we going to do it?’ "
 
Tea sharing epitomizes the attention to personal relationships, exchange, and openness that Bree constantly brings to her life and work. The business world can often seem at odds with grassroots activism, but Bree is confident that she can apply her learning from community work to her business practice. She cites community organizing and cultivating personal relationships as her two greatest skills and as what motives her the most. “These can be very broad concepts,” Bree muses, “but living in a world where there is so much emphasis on ‘what are we going to do?’ my experience has brought me to think that it is more about ‘how are we going to do it?’ That is what has led me to enjoy the work I’ve done.”
 
 
 
 
 

Katie-Jay with little Guisma in the Djabal Refugee Camp, Chad in March 2009 on an i-ACT trip with her team. This was Katie-Jay’s second time seeing Guisima. "Last time we saw her she had a little round face, not so pointy. Her sister died during the past year, and before when they were fleeing from Darfur, her brother died. Adef and Achta, her parents, said that this past year she got sick, but has seemed to recover. She laughed a lot when I tickled her tummy.”
 
For Katie-Jay Scott a day in the office is never the same, or the least bit boring. Katie-Jay is the Director of Operations and Community Involvement for i-ACT, an organization dedicated to working with communities affected by genocide, mass atrocities, and crimes against humanity. Between balancing family and her passion for community organizing, Katie-Jay’s life is fast-paced and busy every day.
           
i-ACT is run by a small staff that manages every aspect of the organization. Much of their work involves Darfur refugees, not only working on the ground in refugee camps, but also creating a campaign around their human experience that personally connects people throughout the world with refugee issues. As an organization, i-ACT seeks to amplify the voices of refugees by telling their stories to people who would otherwise never know about them.
 
In the field, Katie-Jay’s team is working in refugee camps to tackle an ever-persistent problem: lack of quality education, especially preschools. To address this need, i-ACT created the Little Ripples program, which provides communities with the resources to create a preschool curriculum by integrating expert advice, local cultural history, and community members’ stories and games. In particular, the program focuses on areas of learning, peace-building, and trauma recovery. The curriculum they developed is sustainable and can be adapted and implemented wherever refugee populations go.
 
“i-ACT fosters a relationship and it captures the stories of the refugees,” Katie-Jay says. “The programs are human-centered – not solely policy driven.” Through programs addressing activism, sports, and education, i-ACT ensures its programs are community-oriented.
 
Long before Katie-Jay entered the nonprofit world, she was a student in the 2003 Spring semester of CIEE’s Development and Globalization (DG) study abroad program in Khon Kaen, Thailand. The program heavily emphasized teamwork, and Katie-Jay soon learned how to organize communities, facilitate group work, and navigate group dynamics.
 
“The most difficult experience I had as a student in Thailand was when we were split up based on personalities. I was placed in the very outgoing, boisterous, ‘lead from the front’ group,” she said. “At our midyear retreat, the whole DG group called out our group for being overbearing.”
 
This moment became the turning point for Katie-Jay’s semester in Thailand. During group discussions with villagers – a core component of the DG education model - she began to pace herself with comments and questions instead of jumping right in as she had in the past. Stepping back allowed her to realize that she was a better facilitator and organizer when she listened to those around her. 
 
This experience soon shaped Katie-Jay’s interest in facilitating groups when she decided to remain in Thailand as a CIEE intern for eight months after her study abroad semester. As an intern, Katie-Jay led a project on the Pak Mun Dam, which created a space for villagers and groups of people affected by the push for hydroelectric power in Northeast Thailand to come together and share ideas.  Additionally, she acted as a facilitator to help CIEE students efficiently delegate tasks and roles for the project.
 
“In Thailand, I learned how to listen to villagers, work in inner cities, interact with all types of people, and how to apply what I learned through various community efforts and projects.”
 
Once Katie-Jay returned to America, she and other former CIEE interns worked hard to make ENGAGE a legally recognized nonprofit organization. She is one of the founding members of ENGAGE’s Board of Peers, which oversees its long-term strategy and maintains its nonprofit status. She served on the Board of Peers from 2004-2006, and has recently joined ENGAGE’S newly created advisor team. 
 
“ENGAGE is what gave me the foundation and courage to take on other issues,” Katie-Jay says. “With ENGAGE we were trying to coordinate individuals who were living in different states, which set the foundation to test and try new things, start over, and do it all over again.”
 
One of ENGAGE’s first international campaigns was organizing Jasmine Rice Tours, which brought farmers from Thailand to the United States to cultivate awareness about where rice farmed overseas comes from, and to promote the fair trade movement. “The rice tours went through Portland, so I got to meet farmers and other CIEE alums,” says Katie-Jay. She organized two Jasmine Rice Tours, which further fueled her passion for community organizing.
 
Through her involvement in many service and activist organizations, Katie-Jay continues to facilitate discussions between individuals that want to mobilize as a group. Pursuing her drive to bring people together through a common cause, Katie-Jay says, “it’s the fundamental idea that people are the center of everything we do.”
 
Even after all these years and her interest in other projects, Katie-Jay has continued to work with ENGAGE. “The shared experience changed me as a person,” Katie-Jay says, reflecting on her time with CIEE Thailand and her desire to continue being a part of that community.  “Going through the process - whether it’s listening to the villager or working in groups - will guide how you interact with people, and this is what I wanted to apply to being an ENGAGE board member and most importantly, now, a mother.”
 
This past summer, Katie-Jay participated in the 2015 Convergence in L.A., where she led a strategic planning session with attendees to envision the future of ENGAGE. She also helped establish the Grow the Roots Giving Circle, a brand new fundraising program designed to sustain the ENGAGE network. “We want to foster nostalgia with fellow CIEE participants and encourage them to give because this allows us to reconnect with some of the older, wiser, more established members and get them to support younger ENGAGE members.”
 
She hopes that the legacy ENGAGE creates for future CIEE students builds a foundation where people can learn community organizing and facilitation and apply these skills in all aspects of their lives.