My plane landed into the humid tropical air of the Miami International Airport on October second, two-thousand-and-fifteen; in an ironic move north from cold Andean breezes to hot coastal mists. I spent my late childhood dipping my toes into brackish waters like red mangroves, setting roots in Biscayne Bay—fording through waters clouded with sargassum and the not-so-occasional beer cans off our shores. Since moving, I have pieced Miami together through trial and translation, learning about Bahamian labor in our canals through Michael Grunwald's The Swamp, learning English through Anna Quindlen's "A Quilt of a Country," and learning about Florida through my own reflection on the waters of Cutler Drain Canal C-100 behind my grandmother's home. I am a migrant from the last glaciated town of the Venezuelan Andes, a naturalized resident of Florida's sinking coasts, and a Miami Waterkeeper Ambassador, currently studying landscape architecture and urban planning at Harvard University—learning how to make South Florida’s cities coexist with water while caring for our nature and our people. More than an element, more than rain or storm, more than waves crashing ashore or material seeping from canals, water is a cultural record. It reflects how we treat the world and one another through the ways we move, contain, pollute, and regenerate it. South Florida's lifeblood is water—drained from the Everglades through engineered canals and seeped into the Atlantic. Fertilizers are dumped upstream to feed invasive sugarcane while releasing phosphorus and nitrogen pollution downstream, making concentrated profit at the expense of environmental damage—extracting from our landscapes faster than they can recover. It’s this very intersection of landscape urbanism, climate adaptation, and community impact that draws me towards work in territorial-scale water systems pollution treatment within urban settings. I see a future where extractive infrastructure transforms into regenerative landscapes, rewiring scars of exploitation into markers of how to radically imagine a better alternative. I want to reimagine inert canals as water bodies lined by pickerelweed and canna lily that filter water while providing habitat for fish and fireflies. I want water infrastructure to be intentionally slow, not efficient—canals as corridors where people can slow down and coexist with nature, civic and ecological spaces where people can fish and spoonbills can feed in clarified shallows rather than infrastructural afterthoughts of material movement. Within my concurrent degree at Harvard, I’m afforded the privilege and opportunity to imagine and reimagine the expansive possibilities of climate resilient infrastructural design—ones that allow Florida’s canal system be mired with filter marshes and material movement—and where our man-made canals, culverts, and lakes do more than move water; where they phytoremediate our water while teaching people to live and love our nature, the same way I’ve come to. As a Miami Waterkeeper Ambassador, I have hauled seine nets through Biscayne Bay’s seagrasses and studied how mangroves create habitat while anchoring soil. At Oak Grove Park, I have installed floating flowering wetlands as micro-scale water treatment of urban runoff. At Historic Virginia Key, I have replaced Australian pine and Brazilian pepper with sea oats, dune sunflower, and railroad vine, restoring our dune ecosystem while protecting South Florida’s first black beach from eroding away. After standing for four hours, I gave a public comment at Miami's Mayor's budget hearing, advocating against dispossessing the DERM of its power. Water is life only when our culture's reflection is transparent. I want to spend my life regenerating water so the next generations of Floridians see care, not neglect. in their reflections. I want to advocate for communities' right to remain by rooting them in nature and the OFV scholarship would support me in that mission.

As an undergraduate student I pursued architecture believing that high walls and homey halls, alone, could fix the world. Architecture–unlike other disciplines–teaches you to see, care for, and celebrate people by translating needs into space. Yet in practice, architecture is often myopic, self-absorbed with aesthetics while ignoring the environmental damage its hermeticism causes in the world. As an architect, I am pursuing Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning degrees to design regenerative cities without buildings closed-off to the world. That realization crystallized while working with the Earth Architecture Lab in the UK, where the UN International Organization for Migration tasked us to make a housing proposal for internally displaced people. In Somalia, decades of conflict resulted in mass deforestation, accelerating desertification and leaving communities vulnerable to monsoon flash-floods. This systemic failure urged us to question our proposal's ethical impact, designing dignity through capacity-building rather than shelter alone. We thought cumulatively and invested in human capital by teaching communities about adobe. Producing mudbricks from parched soil carved out to make water detention systems, this would let rainwater infiltrate and replenish the aquifers, breathing life back into the soil. Somalia dared me to explore beyond architecture, finding kindred disciplines—only more egalitarian and systemic. I will see, care for, and celebrate people and places by using landscape urbanism as the catalyst to make cities where people, nature, and water coexist. I will pursue regeneration rather than sustainability because sustaining something already broken only prevents it from getting worse—and in doing so, normalizes the very inequities sustainability aims to prevent. In a world aggrieved by worsening climate change, the only way to achieve collective dignity is by actively healing the land, investing in people, and working across silos—treating water, education, housing, and everything in between as interdependent wholes. At Harvard, I study Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning to design cities that elevate people by rooting them in nature. I imagine cities where water-filtering plants restore native habitats while repurposing canals; where circular thinking redirects runoff to rain gardens, not streets; and where green corridors cool-off sidewalks while providing habitat above. Through this work, infrastructure becomes an environmental service and a civic ground, sheltering people from climate displacement while cultivating stewardship of place. This is the difference between sustaining and regenerating a city: the first keeps people living in it, the second instills in people a sense of home. I am the child of a large family, an immigrant from the last glaciated town in the Venezuelan Andes, and a naturalized resident of Florida's sinking coasts. As an architect, aspiring landscape urbanist, and devoted Miamian, I will work to spare others the debilitating pain of displacement my family suffered fleeing home a decade ago. Through community engagement, I will operate at territorial scales, designing sponge cities that regenerate soil while treating water. The Ultrafabrics Inc. Scholarship will allow me to see, care for, and celebrate myself while working to do the same for others—designing cities worth fighting for while advocating for people's right to remain home.

I want to build a city where no one is forced to leave. That is not a metaphor. I grew up in a city that collapsed around my family until leaving was the only option, and I grew up in a city that is slowly sinking into the sea. Venezuela taught me what it means to lose home to political failure. Miami is teaching me what it means to lose home to climate failure. Both are failures of governance, imagination, and the will to invest in people before crisis forces their hand. What I want to build is the infrastructure, policy, and civic imagination to prevent that. Not in the abstract, but concretely, at the scale of watersheds, neighborhoods, and institutions. I am pursuing dual Master's degrees in Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture at Harvard's GSD because I believe the next generation of climate-resilient cities will not be built by designers alone, or by policymakers alone, but by people who refuse to work within those silos. I want to be one of those people. In Miami, that means fighting for a city that treats its water as a cultural and ecological commons rather than a dumping ground for agricultural runoff. It means designing green corridors that cool streets, absorb floodwater, and create dignified public space in the same communities that have been systematically disinvested. It means translating landscape urbanism from an academic discipline into a governance framework that protects low-income and immigrant communities from the displacement that climate change and gentrification are accelerating together. I am already building toward that. Serving as a Miami Waterkeeper Ambassador has grounded my thinking in the relationship between policy, science, and community engagement around our water systems. My Permaculture Certificate and Waterfront Alliance design certification have given me technical fluency in ecological resilience. My work with the IOM in Somalia, designing a capacity-building housing proposal with Sajida El-Sayed, showed me that systemic change is possible when you invest in people's own capacity rather than their dependence. What I am building, ultimately, is a practice rooted in the belief that dignity is not a luxury reserved for those who can afford to stay. It is a right that cities either protect or erode through every zoning decision, every infrastructure investment, and every policy they choose not to make. I want to work within those systems, and against their failures, with the technical expertise and lived understanding to know the difference between a solution that performs and one that actually lasts. I know what it costs to lose home. I am spending my career making sure others do not have to find out.

I am a Venezuelan immigrant who fled political and economic collapse at thirteen, restarting life in Miami with little more than my family and a visceral understanding of what it means to lose home. That experience did not just shape who I am—it shaped how I think, what I design, and why I refuse to work any other way. Most designers learn about displacement through research. I learned it through living it. That distinction follows me into every project I undertake, grounding my practice in the difference between studying a crisis and having survived one. When I received the Steedman Summer Fellowship to research Venezuela's mass migration crisis in Colombia, I arrived expecting to study architecture. Instead, I found myself sitting across from Venezuelan families in Bogotá and Medellín who had made the same journey mine had, and I understood, in ways no textbook could teach, that architecture divorced from the political, economic, and human forces that shape migration is architecture that misses the point entirely. That realization permanently reoriented my practice toward systems thinking, toward understanding cities not as collections of buildings but as ecosystems of governance, culture, and infrastructure that either protect people or fail them. That systems thinking shaped my approach when I collaborated with Sajida El-Sayed through the United Nations' International Organization for Migration and the Earth Architecture Lab to develop a housing proposal for internally displaced people in Somalia. My time in Colombia had shown me how governance, aid, and housing policy could either integrate displaced communities or deepen their vulnerability, and I brought that understanding directly into the design process. Rather than proposing the UN's standard metal and plastic housing, structures that trap heat, extract funds abroad, and leave communities dependent on the next aid cycle, Sajida and I proposed a capacity-building system that maximized every dollar locally. We designed an educational framework that would bring in master masons to train Somali IDPs in mudbrick construction, a material rooted in their own cultural heritage, so that if displaced again, they could build for themselves anywhere. The act of sourcing that mudbrick from the earth would simultaneously carve swales and cisterns into the landscape, creating an irrigation network to improve water percolation and combat desertification. One proposal, compounding across housing, economy, water, and land. Having witnessed in Colombia what happens when aid fails to invest in people's own capacity, I understood that the most dignified thing we could offer was not a house, but the knowledge and infrastructure to build one. What distinguishes me is not simply that I have faced hardship, but that I have spent years translating that hardship into a coherent design philosophy, one that centers dignity, resists dependence, and thinks systemically about the intersection of climate resilience, community development, and governance. I am now pursuing dual Master's degrees in Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture at Harvard's GSD to develop the policy tools and spatial imagination to make that philosophy real and replicable. This scholarship would allow me to focus fully on that work, building the expertise to advocate, at the scale of institutions and cities, for every person's right to remain home. I know what it costs to lose that right. That knowledge is not a footnote to my career. It is the foundation of it.

Leaving Venezuela at thirteen with little more than what we could carry taught me that displacement strips more than possessions—it strips identity, belonging, and the quiet dignity of a place you call home. Restarting in Miami, learning English while watching algal blooms cloud Biscayne Bay, I understood early that where you live shapes everything: your health, your opportunities, your sense of self. Growing up low-income in an immigrant household meant navigating systems that were not designed with us in mind—and learning, out of necessity, to find opportunity in what others overlooked. That visceral experience of forced displacement is the engine behind my work. Miami—my adopted home—is one of the most climate-vulnerable cities in the world. Rising seas, intensifying storms, and decades of environmental extraction threaten to displace the same communities that, like my family, already survived one uprooting. I refuse to watch that happen without fighting it. I plan to work at the intersection of landscape urbanism, climate resilience, and community development—within government or a think-tank—advocating for every person's right to remain home. Having lost a home myself, I do not treat that right as a policy abstraction. I treat it as the entire point. I am actively building toward that work. Completing Oregon State's Permaculture Certificate, earning a Waterfront Alliance design certification, and serving as a Miami Waterkeeper Ambassador have grounded my thinking in the relationship between ecology, policy, and community. Now, pursuing dual Master's degrees in Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture at Harvard's GSD, I am developing the governance frameworks and design tools to translate that conviction into systemic, replicable change—so that no thirteen-year-old has to learn what I learned about losing home.