Structuring movements for collective liberation.
Working to build something transformational.
For over 15 years, I have collaborated with global collectives to secure equity in our most fundamental rights, working alongside frontline movements to challenge extractive industries and protect land and life.
My practice in movement mobilisation is rooted in a core truth: communities closest to the impact already hold the solutions, the leadership, and the localized expertise necessary to drive systemic change.
My role is to build the strategic architecture that connects community visionaries with the structural platforms, sustained resourcing, and global access they require to scale that impact.
My journey in mobilising communities to stand up for land and life started with a clear understanding:
Communities most affected by systemic oppression most often experience the least access to platforms, tools, and resources to make change.
With access front of mind, I lead operational ecosystems that resource land rights, secure narrative sovereignty, and foster environmental resilience against extractive pressures.
I am a program designer and community organizer by trade, deliberately operating at the intersections of social, climate, and economic justice.
I specialise in designing for sociopolitical equity, acting as a catalyst and a structural bridge for communities to mobilize, build power, and govern the futures they are actively creating.
Whether designing cross-border coalitions, establishing decentralized funding models, or shaping participatory narrative strategies, I partner with organizations and movements ready to translate vision into structural action.
Participatory Storytelling
Selected Works
Semifinalist for MIT Solve 2024 Challenge
Why am I in this?
This work is a direct extension of my lived experience.
As a first-generation, working-class migrant, I understand that access is determined by equity.
I design movement infrastructure to shift power toward
the future that frontline communities build.
The commitment to learning and sharing decolonised and feminised approaches is part and parcel with the deconstruction of oppressive systems that impact us differently daily.
The ways that community movements are funded; facilitated; and supported is built on patriarchal and colonial ideas. Communities tell us time and time again that the traditional antiquated NGO approaches don’t work to sustain a fulfilled and unified community.
I was born in Caldas da Rainha, Portugal.
Here, the spark of revolution began against dictator Salazar (thanks to resistance in then-colonised Angola) but it was also the epicentre of the heroin epidemic that decimated families like mine in Western Europe.
Worldwide, the project to decriminalise drug use in Portugal is deemed a success to be replicated. Here, there is controversy. Communities are dependant on legal drug alternatives for decades after, and lack social support.
We were not consulted on what success would look like.
I was raised in Bulanaming (Marrickville), Australia. Our hyper gentrified suburb of 90,000+ people ‘evolved’ from it's crime-riddled diverse and queer past, but who was that development for? Like many places, this progress displacement made it unviable for me, and many others, who came from poor income families to continue living in our neighbourhood.
We were not consulted on what development would look like.
These are the sparks that inform my collaborations
Collaboration by Location
Australia - New Zealand - Papua New Guinea - Indonesia - Ecuador - Egypt - Mexico - Brazil - Honduras - Suriname - Uganda - Tanzania - Portugal - Netherlands - England - Peru - Nepal - India - Myanmar - Thailand
Expertise is built in the territory.
Deep, cross-border immersion has shaped my approach to movement building, teaching me how to forge relational trust and build alongside the people driving our global ecosystems.
We learn what it is to build community through living with, exploring with, and being in community.
“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time.
But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
— Dr. Lilla Watson