Today, I am a deeply motivated woman with a strong sense of direction, but that direction has taken three decades of experience and a cultivated understanding of the gifts and pains I inherited from my upbringing. When I begin to peel back the layers of my life and scrutinize my deepest motivations, the roots I find grow from my parent's seeds. My father is an engineer, a problem solver, and a presenter. He understands the world through articulating design, drafting procedures, and critical assessment. My mother is a technologist, a teacher, and a data connoisseur. She sees the world with labeled Excel sheets, flipped classrooms, and powerful technological tools. Like my father, I am an engineer, I have a mind for design and problem-solving. Like my mother, I am an organizer and a teacher, I articulately present data and assemble people. Unlike my parents though, my views of the world have been shaped by a life-long struggle with chronic pain, medical neglect, and sexual abuse. Most of my twenties were dedicated to the process of diagnosis, I began to practice yoga to help manage pain and participate at a local community farm to keep moving. Now, for more than ten years, body movement and growing my food has cultivated a strong sense of direction and the seeds for the dreams I hold today. Using the seeds my parents gave me and my lived experiences, I am motivated to make a career using my design sensibility, teacher mentality, and healing experience, to reach my community in a different way than my parents have. After years of pursuing an education motivated by my parents' dreams, at 30 years old, I have the confidence to return to school for my own dream job in bodywork and community medicine -a form of medicine that encompasses a variety of practices evolved to maintain and restore health in a local community. I am a survivor, and today 11 years after acute and chronic psychological and sexual abuse, I am learning to thrive. Through therapy, yoga, lifestyle, and a process of changing my innermost dialogue, I have the tools to heal myself and others. Today, I can follow my compass, I can manage PTSD episodes with grace and self-compassion, and I can pursue a career in massage therapy to help other women heal with a loving and therapeutic touch. In roughly 15 months, I will touch my community with healing hands. This scholarship will help me pay for my education at Trocaire College, where I am pursuing Massage Therapy. The experience I will gain at Trocaire coupled with my work ethic and years managing autoimmune conditions, creates a strong foundation for a deeply compassionate healer prepared to use trauma-informed body-therapeutics. Thank you for your consideration!

I AM FROM A SKILLET FROM THE CUTTING BOARD AND THE KNIFE FROM THE SMELL OF ROASTING CHILE I AM FROM THE ART SCATTERED WALLS AND THE AUDIBLE JAZZ I AM FROM THE ROSARY AND MY MOTHER’S HAIR FROM MY FATHER’S CARPENTRY AND MY GRANDFATHER’S WORDS TO SMILE. I AM FROM "PICK UP YOUR BOOTSTRAPS" AND SOAP FOR A FOUL MOUTH I AM FROM “GOOD MORNING MOMMA LOVES YOU” AND “FINISH YOUR PLATE” I AM FROM DINNER AT THE TABLE AND GREEN AND RED I AM FROM THE DESERT LICHEN THE PINON TREES WHOSE LONG LIMBS I REMEMBER AS MY OWN I AM FROM NEW MEXICO SUNRISES AND MYSTERIOUS LINEAGES I AM FROM CASTLES BUILT FROM THE TRASH OF OTHERS AND THE CHICKEN-BUCKET I AM FROM SCARS OF PETROL EXTRACTION AND PUBLIC LANDS I AM FROM TORTILLAS AND HIGH DESERT BREEZES. Storytelling is a force of cultural expression that shapes the human experience. As a student, I have used storytelling in my own education. Creating a podcast landscape to convey my life growing up in the high desert public lands. I animated my adventures playing in the Trash Castle --the old refrigerators, bottles, couches, and truck beds dumped in the expansive deserts behind my home. Today storytelling -through poetry, short form, and podcasts- is a huge force of inspiration in my life to connect. However, reading was not always something I enjoyed. As someone with dyslexia, reading has not always been a companion in my tool belt. For many years, I avoided books, pretending to read and comprehend in order to avoid the humiliation of my classmates realizing I was struggling. During reading comprehension tests, I would create stories in my mind that made every answer the "best possible answer" to the prompt. During spelling bees, I would intentionally spell my first word wrong to avoid the excruciating anxiety of waiting to jumble up my letters in front of the whole class. However, my childhood was filled with the animated bedtime stories my father would read. And it was those experiences that solidified the value of stories and specifically oral storytelling in my life. With the help of tutors and my father bringing stories like Harry Potter to life, I grew to understand and love the value of literature. I learned skills to concentrate, and I learned to use audiobook resources. Since those early struggles, I have developed a deep love and appreciation for the power of books to create escape, convey profound life philosophies, and connect an author and a reader anywhere in the world.

Each morning in June of 2018, I woke to a communal bell at 5:15am in the shared quarters of the Sivananda Yoga Ranch in the Catskills of upstate New York. In those days, before breakfast was served, my mornings were filled with community meditation, kirtan, and asana. There in the rural mountains with the quiet of my mind and the support of fellow yoga trainees, my journey as a professional bodyworker began. Before and since those days, I have studied the body and its mechanics in my free time. As an aspiring massage therapist returning to school in my thirties, I am most excited to dive deeply into the subject matter I study passionately in my own time --anatomy, physiology, and healing touch. For more than ten years, yoga has existed as a mechanism for healing in my life. As a young student with 19 years behind me, I was early in my healing journey and yoga emerged when I (mistakenly) thought that I was too inflexible for yoga. Now, in my thirties, as a nontraditional student, I am not a freshman entering an unknown landscape; instead, I am a veteran that has my own unique challenges. As an older student, I will be working through the duration of my studies. While this decision comes with challenges, I am equipped with the skills to fuel a healthy mind and body. Yoga has taught me the greatest lessons about facing adversity-- the ethos that an activity will be enjoyed for its own sake void of the outcome. This mindfulness carries out in all of my physical practices as a compassion for my physical limitations, an understanding of my mental expansiveness, and a playfulness to enjoy the practice of living through life's many challenges. Today, I am a Hatha and adaptive-oriented yoga instructor. My classes focus on bringing ease into our physical practice while cultivating an intentional and active relationship with the mind, body, and ethos. I use the expanse of yoga therapeutics including breath, asana, meditation, and chants to explore the nervous system and promote a constitution of compassion from within. Compassion is the key to overcome adveristy through the flexibility of mind and the resilience of body. With these skills, I am returning to school to expand my knowledge and skills as a bodyworker to reach more people in my community. In addition to yoga, I will use food as medicine. As an avid cook, the art of delicious and healthy food has helped me manage and thrive with multiple autoimmune conditions. My experience with managing multiple conditions and my passion for healing touch create the foundation for my work as an aspiring massage therapist. Massage therapy satisfies my desire to use my hands in my work while providing my community with a skill set that is increasingly important to the health and well-being of our communities. This scholarship will help support my education at Trocaire College and alleviate some of the financial burdens that school creates. As a non-traditional student, I am equipped with a strong work ethic and a sustainable pace to keep my soul afloat through the challenges of maintaining health and wellness in school.

Women, -we are movers, -we are breathers, - we descend from ancient feminine athletes not just meager, prim and homely fems. Women -we are strong, -we are capable, -we are here to play as our nature intends. Despite, public outcry women have found spaces to play rugby through the past 200 years. “The story of women and rugby has been hidden from history,” - Professor Tony Collins of the International Centre for Sports History and Culture at DMU [1] The roots of modern sports arise from a rich multicultural history defined by the human desires for exercise, conflict resolution, and -most importantly- fun with friends. These traits are not those of men, but of all humans. Women have played an intimate role in the formation, legacy and gameplay of sport. Yet, our history is lost behind the masculine-dominated media of the modern era that has long since hidden, demonetized, and publically humiliated women whom dared to engage with sport. Harpastum or "Sieze" was the name of a game played in Rome over 2000 years ago that descended from an even older Greek game called Episkyros. While the exact rules of these games have fallen through the pages of history, the framework of gameplay resembles many ball sports we play and watch today including soccer, football, and rugby. The game reported rough contact and excessive injury. Notably, women played these sports despite today's perception of the games as violent. Women played these sports thousands of years ago, for the same reason we play them today. We (women) are human, we are movers, and we love the neurochemical high of sports as much as any man. However, our relationship to sports is heavily curated by a societal perception that women are weak. This societal construction shapes women's relationships with their bodies and their sports. Until my twenties, I was similarly a victim of this perception that my feminine attributes equated weakness. I believed in those early days that I could prove my worth as an athlete by pushing through pain and rejecting my body. In my efforts to compensate, I rejected my femininity and embraced a brutal mentality that drove me into a series of sports-related injuries; some of which were sustained from rugby tackles. Over the years of playing sports with other women, I learned to embrace different qualities of sportsmanship that make an athlete. Today, I honor my contribution to sports as a masterful mover, dynamic thinker, and body intuitive. Rugby has a complex game structure that needs a dynamic team of communicators. Team report builds the foundation of gameplay that creates the recipes for success as a rugby athlete. Moreover, an understanding of our strengths helps to develop a balanced and honed team structure. For instance, as a sustained runner with medium height and petite build; I found my home as a fly-half helping to move the rugby ball fast while spreading the field of defense to create a sieve to run through. Rugby has served as a fundamental sport in my life, helping me to relate to the women whom challenged me to step above self-deprecation. Ultimately, the gameplay of rugby is what I have grown to love and admire. As a former rugby athlete, I look at my rugby family as the sport and team that gave me the confidence to see myself as a woman... nothing less. Woman, -I move, -I breathe, - I descend from ancient feminine athletes not just meager, prim and homely fems. Woman, -I am strong, -I am capable, -I am here to play as my nature intends. [1] https://www.dmu.ac.uk/research/research-news/2017/june/hidden-history-of-womens-rugby-to-be-revealed-by-dmu-researchers.aspx

My journey with food is the story of how I found my place in medicine. The best experiences of food and storytelling are those of connection. For a time in my life, I lost a meaningful connection to food. After repeated episodes of sugar-induced hypoglycemia, hypotension, and loss of consciousness, I began a systematic elimination of foods to discover the culprits... only what I found was that nearly all food garnered painful inflammation. Determined to feel better, I lived on a strict low-sugar, low-histamine, low-inflammatory diet. However, my relationship with food became one of fear, isolation, and grief: fear that the food-induced anaphylaxis would return; isolation from friends and family gatherings; and grief about my deteriorated passion for cooking. Eventually, I met food as medicine – a profound appreciation that has shaped my relationship with food for five years now. Through the power of a rich and fresh plant-based diet, and a community of supportive friends, food has reclaimed its poetry in my life. Through the hardship of losing foods like potatoes and gluten, I have found miraculous grains like millet. Through my struggles with digestion, I have learned about indigenous ways to prepare grains and beans like nixtamalization which make them easier to digest and more bioavailable. After years of fearing food, I have regained my role as an alchemist in my kitchen toasting cumin, soaking beans, and communing over the meals that I intrinsically prepare to share. My desire to share moves beyond my kitchen, into a deep desire within myself to help others cultivate a healthy relationship with their bodies, communities, and the earth. I am involved with several organizations dedicated to social justice with a particular focus on community access and education around green spaces, food, and medicine. Today our food is extremely depleted due to poor soil conditions, toxic inputs like pesticides, limited selection, and financial barriers. The industrial systems of agriculture are hostile to people, animals, and the environment at large. There is a lot of education that a person needs to navigate this system; and, food deserts, endless concrete, and hostile anti-loitering architecture disproportionately affect lower-income, non-white, queer, and disabled communities. In the effort to dismantle and reimagine these practices, I focus on regenerative community building that prioritizes more than a communities basic needs. Many studies have observed a significant reduction in crime amongst communities that have adequate access to basic needs and green spaces. Moreover, I fundamentally believe that people deserve more than the dignity of a clean home, but also the choice of diverse food and medicine and the pleasure of beautiful spaces. Through my involvement with organizations like Grassroots Gardens and the Good Farmers Guild of WNY, I am helping to educate and organize around improving access to healthy, sustainable, and ethically grown foods. Today, food is not an obstacle in my health journey, but rather a fundamental medicine that helps to aid me in living and thriving with complex autoimmune conditions. I see my experience with autoimmune disease as the catalyst for my career path in community medicine as a farmhand and massage therapist. While I have always felt a draw towards healthcare, it was medicines like nutrition, yoga therapeutics, and structural bodywork that I found the most relief for my conditions. It is now my deepest desire to give the tools I have learned to my community. Touching my community is at the core of my values, and the next chapter of my journey begins with returning to school. This scholarship will help me to realize my dreams of beginning a community clinic. Thank you!

In the early hours of 2023, sitting silently, I choose three words to guide the New Year--whole, vibrant, and inspired. These words speak to a deep transformation, a cascade of positive feelings and healthy mantras that blossomed out of serious trauma, anxiety, and performativity that defined so much of my early life. I am a survivor, more than that though, I am a champion of my mental health today. That transformation has shaped everything about who I am today and the work I have chosen to pursue. For a long time, behind my bedroom door, torrential emotional episodes unfolded as I would physically undress and mentally unmask to face my pillow. As a child, I struggled silently with severe and chronic pain as well as episodes of depression and anxiety. These episodes stemmed from underlying autoimmune conditions that went undiagnosed into my mid-twenties. Moreover, my parents did not have the skills to navigate mental health stuck in their loop of intergenerational trauma. I was conditioned to distrust my emotions, ignore physical pain, and avoid social conflict --"You are being too sensitive", "Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about." "You're so dramatic, get over it," "Pick yourself up and push through," "No excuses," or the kicker "Be the bigger person..." something my dad would say to me after my mother would scream degrading things at me. I learned to accept the negative judgment of others as truth and I believed that I was unworthy of love as a sensitive person. To cope with the chronic pain and autistic sensitivities, I learned to mask. I adopted and mimicked neurotypical behaviors to survive the social situations of school and home life, all while neglecting my needs and actively suppressing my natural and cognitive behaviors. I became so proficient at masking that I developed an intense distrust for my body and my mind. I developed extreme dissociation and dysphoria, crying myself to sleep most nights in high school. As a young adult, without the tools to navigate the world, I became susceptible to predatory figures. Between the age of 17 and 20, I experienced stalking, harassment, rape, and psychological manipulation that I managed to escape. In the years that followed, I found practices like holistic eating and yoga; practices that have continued to shape my health and passions ever since. Eventually, I stumbled through obstacles as I clumsily fell into therapy. For years, I bounced between therapists stuck within curated blinders to avoid looking at my deep wounds. And while my general quality of life improved, my mental and physical struggles continued. My mental health was unstable and I frequently experienced PTSD episodes that were debilitating. One such episode began early in 2020. In shock, lost, and deeply triggered, I spiraled into a sustained episode of suicidal ideation and existential confusion. With the guidance of my partner, I applied for Medicaid, found a therapist, and received critical outpatient care. While I have a long history of mental health struggles, the episode I experienced in 2020 represents a pivotal point in my journey when I dove into a pool of suicidal ideation and surfaced with the guidance of a compassionate licensed therapist. Over the next year, I fought through bouts of anxiety and fury as I painstakingly undressed my life's story to my therapist. While many others struggled with the isolation of the Covid Pandemic, I took the solitude to mend deep wounds. For months, I worked at a grocery store putting one foot in front of the other. That therapist helped me seed a path to mental health, I continue to walk today. Years later, I am still trekking in the wake of that life-altering mental health pilgrimage. Through love, hard work, and community, I am here and doing better than ever. Moreover, I continue to work on my relationship with my parents to help them break -even a little bit- the grip that generational trauma holds within their lives. Each time my parents can find vulnerability to share with me, I feel a deep sense of pride for the ways that we, as humans, can continue to grow and evolve. Many of us face extreme obstacles that hinder our abilities to survive and thrive. Sometimes, it is simply the acts of a nice neighbor or a therapist, that plant the seeds for a better life. It is my ambition to offer helping hands to those in my community through healing touch. At the cusp of thirty years old, I am returning to school to pursue Massage Therapy and develop an enterpenueral career in community medicine. Over the last decade, I have developed a deep passion and love for community building and holistic medicine. Collaboration is essential for effective community medicine. As medical providers, we face a disease landscape of growing complexity. Only through diverse, equitable, and inclusive medicines, can we begin to tackle the growing issues of environmental-related disease and poverty. Pulling from diverse science and medicine, we can start the greater projects of healing intergenerational trauma, systemic illness, and climate disaster all of which disproportionally affect racialized communities. My approach to community work comes from the disability justice principles which aim to uplift those most impacted, recognize our inherent worth, and promote care through an understanding of intersectionality. I use these principles to work with diverse communities now and through my prospective work as a massage therapist. Here, is another pivotal time in my story, as I take my fate into my hands. Now with a deep conviction and a loving inner gaze, I begin a career to spread the healing power of bodywork. As a healer in my community, I will offer a loving touch to aid others in their physical and mental health journeys. In the Fall of 2023, I will begin as a student at the Trocaire College of Western New York. This scholarship will help me serve the health of my community directly.

I am a mud lover. One who enjoys a day that ends with stained knees, mud-crusted boots, and dirt under my fingertips. Since my earliest days playing with chickens in my mother's strawberry patch and helping my father to build grey water filters, my parents have cultivated a strong sense of work ethic and a love for using my hands in my work. However, I have not always known what direction to extend my hands. Today, I am a deeply motivated woman with a strong sense of direction, but that direction has taken three decades of experience and a cultivated understanding of the gifts and pains I inherited from my upbringing. When I begin to peel back the layers of my life and scrutinize my deepest motivations, the roots I find grew from my parent's seeds. My father is an engineer, a problem solver, and a presenter. He understands the world through articulating design, drafting procedures, and critical assessment. My mother is a technologist, a teacher, and a data connoisseur. She sees the world with labeled Excel sheets, flipped classrooms, and powerful technological tools. Like my father, I am an engineer, I have a mind for design and problem-solving. Like my mother, I am an organizer and a teacher, I articulately present data and assemble people. Unlike my parents though, my views of the world have been shaped by a life-long struggle with chronic pain. Most of my twenties were dedicated to the process of diagnosis, I began to practice yoga to help manage pain and participate at a local community farm to keep moving. Now, for more than ten years, body movement and growing my food has cultivated a strong sense of direction and the seeds for the dreams I hold today. Using the seeds my parents gave me and my lived experiences, I am motivated to make a career using my design sensibility, teacher mentality, and healing experience, to reach my community in a different way than my parents have. Bodywork and market farming may seem unrelated to an onlooker, however, I see them as two trades fundamentally designed to uplift, preserve, and mend societal health. As a farmer and massage therapist, my hands facilitate important biological processes. Farmers plant seeds in soils they amend to feed a community, while massage therapists knead muscle and fascia to release tensions that obstruct optimal health and well-being. While all trades are critical to the infrastructure of society, I am most passionate about cultivating a career in the trades of growing healthy food, facilitating intimate gatherings, and providing therapeutic touch. I call this intersection of trade community medicine -a form of medicine that encompasses a variety of practices evolved to maintain and restore health to a local community. After years of pursuing an education motivated by my parents' dreams, at 30 years old, I have the confidence to return to school for my own dream job in bodywork and community medicine. I will start as a nontraditional student in the Trocaire College program for massage therapy in the Fall of 2023. After the completion of my degree, it is my dream to open a small massage clinic and a perennial herb and tree farm. With a growing demand for bodyworkers in our communities, massage therapy will provide security to the volatile finances of farming. The experience I will gain at Trocaire coupled with my work ethic and years managing autoimmune conditions, creates a strong foundation for a successful career in the trades. In roughly 15 months, I will touch my community with healing hands.

I am an ecologist, farmhand, yoga instructor, educator and student of the human body; I am becoming a community healer and food justice activist leading community health initiatives through healing touch, expanding green space, storytelling, and ecologically sound agriculture.

I am a mud lover. One who enjoys a day that ends with stained knees, mud-crusted boots, and dirt under my fingertips. Since my earliest days playing with chickens in my mother's strawberry patch, my love for the earth has only grown. As a young ecologist, I developed science fair projects to filter greywater, dilute noise pollution, and eventually reclaim the barren soil of wellsites. I became immeshed in soil reclamation after my exposure to a satellite images of the desert surrounding my childhood home pitted with the remnants of old wellsites. The San Juan Basin of northern New Mexico produces 80% of the coalbed methane in the US. The scars from over 40,000 active and inactive wellsites are visible from space [3]. The four years of high school, I poured myself into reclamation literature and soil experiments. I uncovered countless flaws within the standardized methods of reclamation, including the widespread use of fast-growing and non-native plants which creates swaths of land unsuitable for regional fauna to survive due to non-native forage and erosion. And these practices are not unique to Northern New Mexico. Today roughly "40-50 percent of Earth’s ice-free terrestrial surface is now in use for agriculture, forestry, and human settlements […] three-quarters of the terrestrial biosphere has been transformed directly and indirectly by human use of land" [2]. This is startling when we consider that healthy habitats -like old-growth forests, temperate savannah grasslands, and peatland- are essential for sequestering carbon. According to the World Resource Institute (WRI), the Congo Rain Forest is the only major tropical rainforest that remains a strong carbon sink. "The Congo’s tropical rainforest sequesters [...] equivalent to about one-third of the CO2 emissions from all U.S. transportation" [1]. On the other hand, over 80 million hectares of Southeast Asian rainforests have been lost to plantations and uncontrolled fires since 2005; and the Amazon Basin deforestation continues. Resource extraction and agriculture remain the largest sources of deforestation today. While these issues feel larger than life, we are each capable of affecting meaningful change through local participation. To mitigate climate change I propose a multifaceted approach in four distinct sectors: (1) Decreased energy consumption; (2) Elimination of deforestation and the preservation of large forest stands, (3) Reclamation of wetlands and grasslands; and (4) Regenerative agriculture --in the US, by simply cover-cropping inactive wellsites and agricultural lands in winter, we could offset 18% of US-generated carbon emissions annually [4]. As a graduate student, I studied waste management systems and developed a deep passion for the role of agroforestry in transforming land use. I see agroforestry and urban rewilding projects as a vital form of land stewardship that will promote biodiversity on the 40-50% of land occupied by humans. Agroforestry projects like those through the Savanah Institute have already had immense success rewilding vital wetlands in the temperant Savanah of the US while creating climate-resilient farms that produce perennial food sources. Starting in our communities, we can affect big change. In my community, I am working to combine my passions for ecology and community medicine through projects that aim to expand and rewild the green spaces of Urban Western New York. I am an active participant in the Good Farmers Guild connecting farmers and I am an organizer with the Farm in Community Initiative reshaping the food systems of Western New York. My work as a mud-lover continues today inspiring and educating the next generation of farmers to prioritize healthy and biodiverse ecosystems through agroforestry, rangeland management, and no-tillage practices. [1] Anthropogenic transformation of the biomes, 1700 to 2000.(2010) [2] https://www.wri.org/insights/forests-absorb-twice-much-carbon-they-emit-each-year [3] https://www.naturalgasintel.com/information-about-the-san-juan-basin/#top [4] https://www.wri.org/insights/regenerative-agriculture-good-soil-health-limited-potential-mitigate-climate-change

Generational wealth is about more than money, it is about knowledge. While I have never been "bad" with money, there were certain lessons that I learned in adulthood because I did not understand them as an 18-year-old leaving home for the first time. As a young adult, I made a series of decisions about money that, in retrospect, were not smart for my long-term financial stability. I sought higher education without understanding my long-term goals and passions. I invested in projects and objects that depreciated and I had to sell those ventures at loss. In both the example of pursuing higher education and investing in bad projects, the intentions were in the right place. However, in both cases, I acted out of haste. Before leaving home, I received immense parental and social pressure to go to college. However, I had very little support to interrogate my dreams, so I pursued the dreams of my father and studied engineering. While I gained immense skills in school, I ultimately left engineering because it was not my passion and started a long journey of stumbling through different ventures trying to find the elusive "success". While that phase in my life was challenging, I learned how to manage my money through those mistakes. I grew a strong aptitude for budgeting and managing my finances. And under it all, I grew a deep yearning to feel financially stable. I wanted to reach a place where money was not a hurdle to overcome, but a tool that I can deploy to achieve my dreams and the dreams of my family. For me, passing that knowledge and those skills on is Generational Wealth. After years of pursuing an education motivated by the dreams of others, at 30 years old, I have the confidence to return to school for my own dream job in bodywork and community medicine. I will start as a nontraditional student in the Trocaire College program for massage therapy in the Fall of 2023. Without scholarships and student loans, school is unaffordable for me, so I have set out a serious budget and sought scholarships. In planning my finances to go back to school, I knew I needed to choose a profession that served my passions, my health, my career trajectory, and my financial goals. Massage therapy satisfies my desire to use my hands in my work while providing my community with a skill set that is increasingly important to the health and well-being of our communities. I have chosen Trociare College because, in addition to normal student clinics, they participate in externships, so I will be able to work in several different settings (clinical and recreational) before completing my degree and entering the workforce. With about 25,200 job openings each year, Massage Therapy offers employment stability. The field is expected to continue growing by 20% between now and 2031 according to the US Bureau of labor statistics. Moreover, Trocaire College is arguably the best program for massage therapy in Western New York and has a great reputation for getting its students into the workforce. The experience I will gain at Trocaire coupled with my years of self-study managing autoimmune disease creates a strong foundation. In roughly 15 months, I will be ready to touch my community with healing hands. Drawing from my lived experience, It is my dream to one day create a community center that among other things provides educational resources to the community like affordable community medicine, healthy cooking, and the fundamental skills of money management necessary for lasting generational wealth.

The lands I know as my home were first sovereign homes and remain homes to the Navajo, Jicarilla-Apache, Southern Ute, Ute Mountain Ute, and Hopi. The San Juan Basin, which encompassed my childhood home, is suspended over the largest coal-bed methane field and second-largest gas reserves in the world. The oil and gas industry giant is but one of the colonial infrastructures that shape the culture of Northern New Mexico. My own father’s connection to the oil and gas industry is what fed my family and ultimately sparked my environmental activism. In high school, I saw satellite images of the desert surrounding my childhood home completely pitted with the remnants of old well sites. The pitted landscape of my childhood home remains at the forefront of my mind as I work to cultivate a healing relationship with the planet and my communities. That image exposed me to the ways that our environment affects the health of our communities and the ways that communities of color experience the greatest burdens of intergenerational, environmental injustice. During a course in Societal Health, I watched a documentary that explored how cultural foods of indigeneity like fry bread came about and how they shape modern crises like diabetes facing communities living on reservations across the United States. After indigenous peoples were forcibly displaced from their ancestral lands, those communities were forced to adapt to unfamiliar and non-native foods. Foods like white flour, refined sugar, and processed animal protein products are colonial foods that the US government introduced to indigenous people through the USDA’s Food Distribution Program. These colonial foods have a complicated relationship within modern cultures of indigeneity and the way non-indigenous communities see indigenous peoples. The documentary generated a cascade of questions for me about the state of health in the world. As I learned about the ongoing and systemic effects of colonialism, I committed myself to projects of unobscuring and reimagining our world through holistic community medicine that addresses structural determinants of health. In one such role, I facilitated a podcast directing twenty students. I coordinated workshops to train undergraduate students how to compose compelling stories, and how to critically assess the impact of our messages on the communities featured in our podcast. Sensitive, critical, and reflexive production was essential because we presented stories about displacement (i.e. gentrification and immigration). In that role, I learned to listen to and respond to the needs of my students and organize a democratic, safe, and productive working environment. Moreover, I developed valuable skills in non-violent communication for meaningful collaboration. Collaboration is essential for effective community medicine. As medical providers, we face a disease landscape of growing complexity. Only through diverse, equitable, and inclusive medicines, can we begin to tackle the growing issues of environmental-related disease and poverty. Pulling from diverse science and medicine, we can start the greater projects of healing intergenerational trauma, systemic illness, and climate disaster all of which disproportionally affect racialized communities. As a white woman working in yoga therapeutics, studying movement massage therapies, and practicing regenerative food systems, I have faced constant deliberation about the ethics behind my use of indigenous and diasporic knowledges. My ability to work as an ally to BIPOC communities without erasing the diverse origins of knowledge is an ongoing reflexive process. My approach to community work comes from the disability justice principles which aim to uplift those most impacted, recognize our inherent worth, and promote care through an understanding of intersectionality. I use these principles to work with diverse communities in classrooms, on farms, in yoga offerings, and through my prospective work as a massage therapist.

As much as sports are about winning, they are more about losing... Discipline. Teamwork. Communication. Resilience. Physical Strength and Endurance. These are just a few of the words that stand out when I think about why sports play an important part in the human experience. To a degree, I can attribute the depth of these quality traits in myself to the years that I spent playing team sports like soccer, ultimate frisbee and rugby, and growing through individual sports like cross country, rock climbing, skiing, and backpacking. However, as a person who thrives with multiple autoimmune conditions, the lesson I am still learning is when to stop, when to walk away, and how to accept losing. Because losing is perhaps the hardest and arguably the most important lesson we learn in life. At the age of 14, I ran as a competitive cross-country and track athlete. I was among the fastest women in San Juan County regularly competing for the top three positions across the district. With a childlike sense of immortality, I believed that my feet could always carry me lightly across the high desert and far away from the pains of adolescence. Only my young body could not carry me away from unknown autoimmune conditions. With pressure from my parents and coaches, I kept running despite chronic pain and fatigue. Without proper stretching and excessive running, I began to experience overuse injuries. And the week before district competition, I ripped tissues in the arches of my feet. My coach insisted that I could not quit, so I ran the district meet injured and I did not qualify for state. I continued to compete as a cross-country and track athlete all four years of high school. As a runner, I understood how to keep going, how to visualize the finish line, and how to push myself. However, I only learned how to give up, how to let go, and how to say NO after years of pushing through the pain and repeating serious injuries. In life, we are faced with loss constantly. Humbly accepting the circumstances of loss, creates the ability to enjoy every small win in life. Learning to lose with grace is learning to live with gratitude for those things in life that go our way and learning to take every opportunity to learn and grow. For me, learning to lose has been a lifelong lesson of setting boundaries, getting back up after injury, gaining the body awareness to prevent injury, and having the courage to choose another direction. For more than ten years, yoga has existed as a mechanism for healing in my life. It emerged when I (mistakenly) thought that I was too inflexible for yoga. At the time, as a sophomore at University, I was early in my healing journey. Today, I am a Hatha and adaptive-oriented yoga instructor. My classes focus on bringing ease into our physical practice while cultivating an intentional and active relationship with the mind, body, and ethos. I use the expanse of yoga therapeutics including breath, asana, meditation, and chants to explore the nervous system and promote a constitution of compassion from within. Compassion is the key to overcome loss through the flexibility of mind and the resilience of body. Yoga has taught me the greatest lessons about sportsmanship -- the ethos that an activity will be enjoyed for its own sake void of the outcome. This mindfulness carries out in all of my physical practices as a compassion for my physical limitations, an understanding of my mental expansiveness, and a playfulness to enjoy the practice --win or lose.

As a family, we regularly drove the scenic 550 Highway to visit my Grandparents in Albuquerque at the latest Habitat for Humanity builds. Our efforts supported families to achieve affordable housing, financial stability, and a community of friends and mentors. Every year my grandparents joined a build in another country, helping communities affected by a natural disasters, diminishing resources, and poverty. The year after my Grandpa's passing, I joined my Grandma on a build in Guatemala. This experience was invaluable. I witnessed an organization led by locals that understood the needs of the families we served and the issues specific to each village that Habitat for Humanity serviced. What I witnessed was the impact that sustainable and transformative development can have on a community and the impact that values have when put into action. My parents instilled the role of public service early in my childhood; especially through our 4-H club --the Clever Clovers. We hosted clean-ups of the vast public lands of the New Mexico High Desert. We ran drives for the local food pantries. We swept the nooks and crannies of the Aztec Museum to reveal story-filled objects beneath the dust. And each holiday season, we brought games to our local senior living facility to enrich the elder community with companionship and laughs. While these were small acts compared to "building a house", the impact they have had on my life is fundamental to my life goals. Now, I wear many hats as a farmhand, storyteller, yoga therapist, and prospective bodyworker. The defining thread between these identifiers is their distinct connection to service, public engagement, and community. Moreover, I have learned that community service can and should look like big projects and small acts of kindness. As an adult, I am involved with several organizations dedicated to social justice with a particular focus on community access to green spaces, fresh food, and medicine. Food deserts, endless concrete, and hostile anti-loitering architecture disproportionately affect lower-income, non-white, queer, and disabled communities. In the effort to dismantle and reimagine these practices, I aim to practice a regenerative model of community building that prioritizes more than a communities basic needs. Many studies have observed a significant reduction in crime amongst communities that have adequate access to basic needs and green spaces. Moreover, I have a fundamental belief that people deserve access to more than the dignity of a clean home, but also access to choice and pleasure -- the choice of diverse food and medicine and the pleasure of beautiful spaces. Over the last year, I have been involved in several organizations aiming to address these social issues. Through Grassroots Gardens of WNY, I have participated with the Therapeutic Gardening Action Group to spread the benefits of green spaces to communities across Buffalo. In May, we will host a therapeutic memorial service in several therapeutic gardens to support the Eastside in grieving and rebuilding in the wake of the TOPS shoot of 2022. Through the Young Farmers Coalition of WNY, I am helping to create an annual event with the Black Farmers of NYS to introduce young black youth to the art and science of agriculture. And with my studies at Trociare College, I aim to bring the art and medicine of massage therapy to communities that lack the resources to receive its health-altering benefits. Touching my community is at the core of my values, and my participation in service projects has touched my communities figuratively through policy advocacy and literally through farming, street cleanups, and home-raising projects. The next chapter of my journey with community justice begins with returning to school.

My passion for food and medicine appeared first in my childhood games of doctor, grocery clerk, and connoisseur of mud pies. Today those childhood dreams continue to manifest as a deep desire to heal myself and my community. Because trades are overlooked and undervalued in society, it took me into my late twenties to realize that traditional academic, number-crunching, and corporate office 9-5 jobs were not for me. Rather, I would cut my career from the cloth of trade and return to school at 30 years old. In the fall of 2023, I will begin my studies in massage therapy. As a massage therapist, I will have a reliable career with flexibility that will support my greater desire to operate a community farm. Bodywork and market farming may seem unrelated to an onlooker, however, I see them as two trades fundamentally designed to uplift, preserve, and mend societal health. A farmer and a massage therapist use their hands to facilitate important biological processes. Farmers plant seeds in soils they amend to feed a community, while massage therapists knead muscle and fascia to release tensions that obstruct optimal health and well-being. While all trades are critical to the infrastructure of society, I am most passionate about cultivating a career in the trades of growing healthy food, facilitating intimate gatherings, and providing therapeutic touch. I call this intersection of trade community medicine --a form of medicine that encompasses a variety of practices evolved to maintain and restore health to a local community. My success in the trades of massage therapy and farming will come from a good education at Trocaire College and my unique combination of skills including: (1) my habits of self-study and an insatiable thirst to learn about farming and body physiology, (2) my business administration skills like computer programming, social media promotion, and graphic design, which will support my business entrepreneurship, and (3) my work ethic and attention to detail. Moreover, I am versed in food systems with experiences ranging from my 4‐H background in animal husbandry to my family's ties to large livestock and crop production. I am passionate about regenerative agriculture principles with farmhand experience at market gardens using techniques that center soil health and ecosystem diversity in both urban and rural settings. These experiences provide me with insight directly into contemporary farming struggles and farming-specific communication skills. This scholarship will help support my education at Trocaire College. I have chosen this program because, in addition to normal student clinics, they participate in externships, so I will be able to work in several different settings (clinical and recreational) before completing my degree and entering the workforce. Trocaire College is arguably the best program for massage therapy in Western New York and has a great reputation for getting its students into the workforce. The experience I will gain at Trocaire coupled with my years of self-study managing autoimmune disease creates a strong foundation. In roughly 15 months, I will be ready to touch my community with healing hands. Success for me will looks like financial security to support my family, occupational flexibility to support my health, a fulfilling career in massage therapy, and the setup to create a sustainable farm.

Does a series count? I would have the whole world read Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials and the Books of Dust. Pullman has an uncanny ability to capture a world filled with complex characters that face deeply personal and existential journeys. While his universe is fictitious, the underlying motivations are quite relevant to the experience of aging in our modern societies. Using worldbuilding, Pullman's stories unpack issues of identity, mental health, sociopolitical systems, disaster politics, relationships, religion, and death. The themes of parallel universes, deamons, and scientific philosophy propel the reader into exciting and critical inquiry. Pullman's characters carry a depth of complexity that makes them far more interesting than good or bad. The story begins with a lighter, naive tone following the main protagonists, Lyra and Pantalaimon. Throughout the series, as Lyra ages, the story, world, and cast of characters take on greater complexity. Meanwhile, the plot ages with Lyra's character as she grows, learns, and faces new problems. These books offer an in-depth dive into critical thought, using powerful stories that allow us to depart from our mundane problems for the beautifully theatrical and believable plot of His Dark Material and the Book of Dust. One of the primary themes of the book pushes against dogmatic beliefs that create systems of bias -systems that alienate "others"-- those that do not look like, abide by, believe in, or follow the dogmatic belief. Another important theme follows the story of mental health, internal struggle, and the quest to find one's self. The layers of complexity in Pullman's writing create a beautiful labyrinth that readers can return to time and again to pull away different subtext. Overall, the series embarks the reader on a deep quest that reflects out and into our lives. I think in an age when critical thought is undervalued, Pullman's fiction offers an exciting and relevant world for building critical readers.

I have lived with chronic pain and fatigue for as long as I can remember though, my journey to diagnosis began in my twenties when a series of traumatic events catapulted me into a solitary pursuit of answers. The diagnosis process was painful and lonely --it stretched across several years and to a degree continues today. However, diagnosis is only a part of my story. I see my experience with autoimmune disease as a story of falling in love with myself. To tell that story, I chose food, because the best experiences of food and storytelling are those of connection. For a time in my life, I lost a meaningful connection to food. I learned to cook my first pancake at eight years old; I perfected the alfredo sauce at 14; and I created the immaculate green chile bagel at 21. In those years, while I was abandoning recipes for my own spice sensibilities, the deepest and most cellular parts of myself began to rebel. For years, chronic pain and illness defined my existence. Eating became the source of fatigue, inflammation, and myalgia. And my relationship with food became one of pure utilitarianism and anxiety. One does not understand the social nature of food… until food is lost and social life with it. After repeated episodes of sugar-induced hypoglycemia, hypotension, and loss of consciousness, I began a systematic elimination of foods to discover the culprits... only what I found was that nearly all food garnered inflammatory responses. For nearly two years, I lived on a strict low-sugar, low-histamine, low-inflammatory diet. While the diet relieved my inflammation and provided relief from brain fog and fatigue, my relationship with food became one of fear, isolation, and grief: fear that the food-induced anaphylaxis would return; isolation from friends and family gatherings; and grief about my deteriorated passion for cooking. Eventually, I met food as medicine – a profound appreciation that has shaped my relationship to food for five years now. Through the power of cooking and a community of supportive friends, food has reclaimed its poetry in my life. Through the hardship of losing foods like potatoes and gluten, I have found miraculous grains like millet. Through my struggles with digestion, I have learned about indigenous ways to prepare grains like nixtamalization which make grains easier to digest and more bioavailable. Through a desire to eat bread and pasta, I have learned to cultivate rice sourdough and pasta. After years of fearing food, I have regained my role as an alchemist in my kitchen toasting cumin, soaking beans, and communing over the meals that I intrinsically prepare to share. Among these lessons with food, I have also learned to share meals with those people in my community that support me and to build boundaries with those people that do not. Today, I experience food like poetry, I feel for the texture, the layers, and the space between forkfuls. In the spaces -between the bites of food and the verses- there is an opportunity… an invitation… I thought I lost that invitation, only to find a more sacred and emotively nourishing connection to food and the people I share it with. Today, food is not an obstacle in my health journey, but rather an ever-changing relationship that helps to aid me in living and thriving with Ankylosing Spondylitis, Mast Cell Dysfunction, and Mitochondrial Dysfunction. This scholarship will help me to become a massage therapist -a career that satisfies my passion to work as a healer in my community, but also a career that I can shape to support my health and well-being. Thank you!