equity design essentials
Guest Experts
Virgie Tovar
Since 2011, Virgie Tovar has non-judgmentally taught people about the harmful effects of weight-based discrimination and the benefits of celebrating body diversity. She is an author, lecturer, and leading expert on weight-based discrimination and body positivity. Tovar holds a Master's degree in Sexuality Studies with a focus on the intersections of body size, race and gender. She is a contributor for Forbes where she covers the plus-size market and how to end weight discrimination at work. Tovar is the author of You Have the Right to Remain Fat, The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color and The Body Positive Journal. Virgie has been featured by the New York Times, Tech Insider, BBC, MTV, Al Jazeera, NPR, and Yahoo Health, and has received Yale's Poynter Fellowship in Journalism. She lives in San Francisco. Read more about virgie here!
Brett Ramey
Brett (Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska) works across areas of Indigenous stewardship, land-based education, and participatory design. He serves as Climate Resilience Planner for the Ioway Tribe, which includes leading an internship program and supporting land stewardship of Ioway Tribal National Park. This work informs his contributions in other areas of Indigenous conservation and food systems, including leading participatory grantmaking programs that support leadership of Indigenous and other people of color in food sovereignty, conservation, and climate justice spaces. Prior to returning to the midwest in January 2020, he served as Director of the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program at the University of Washington, a national undergraduate program that infuses biocultural conservation with Indigenous knowledges and environmental justice. He is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Northeast Kansas. Hear more from Brett here!
