We are honored to welcome Alexie Torres as our first guest on Creating Common Sky:Conversations in a fractured world.

Alexie is a nationally recognized leader in social and environmental justice. She has a vast wealth of experience and many potent stories to share. She is a national voice on issues of faith, community organizing, and the sacred work of social justice.

Alexie is the founder of Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice (YMPJ) working with young people on issues ranging from education to policing and environmental justice. The mission being to prepare young people to become prophetic voices for peace and justice. She served as its executive director for 17 years.

She co-founded the Bronx River Alliance  and the  Southern Bronx River Watershed Alliance. The organization cleaned-up abandoned industrial sites, expanded the Bronx River greenway, and developed green infrastructure. Working with community to reclaim and protect the bronx river which had become highly industrialized and was inaccessible to the people in her community. This was a fundamental part of her work as an urban planner, activist for environmental justice, and community organizer, Torres has lived into the full meaning of her given name, Alexie: “Defender of Humankind.”

In 2013, Alexie was awarded the prestigious Loeb Fellowship through Harvard University.

She has served on President Obama’s White House advisory council on faith based and neighborhood partnerships. The council aimed to reduce poverty and inequality and create opportunity for all.

She is the Managing Director of Jubilee Gift, board member of Fr. Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation.

Currently she co-created the Soul of the Movement Fund to connect healers and wisdom keepers to social movements.She has been named one of "50 Visionaries Changing Our World.” By Utne Reader

A mother of two, Torres has inspired a new generation of young leaders dedicated to promoting peace and justice in their communities. Her vision for change has led her to effect positive change within public spaces and marginalized communities.

Please join us in conversation with this powerful grassroots activist and defender of humankind.

" Social movements protect what is most sacred about us."

"We had to tell ourselves a story, that we were other, that we were separate. We've had to tell ourselves the story that the earth is other. That the earth is something else, something to be conquered, something to be dominated, it's something to be extracted from.Because if we really understood our belonging to it and each other we would not and could not be capable of doing what we do to each other."

"We have to be bridge builders  and we have to be able to be bridges or compassion and love."

"There is a reckoning that needs to happen and there is work that needs to be done and there are bodies and people that need us to stand up for them and defend them"

"I think that we have to be able to hold both in this moment. Constantly, radically doing things like what you are doing here, having these conversations about how we shift. Understanding still that tomorrow I've got to do the right thing by my community, I've got to protect the people I need to protect. But I don't need to do that in a way that is about othering."

"The opposite of love is not hate, the opposite of love is fear."

"I do think that in this moment in human history we have so much that we can learn from communities that have suffered for a long time, have been at the margins for a long time."

"It was my father who was there, it was bus loads of people from communities across the city, it was immigrant women and men, it was the pregnant teen, it was the teenager with their pants down their bottom, it was like all of the people that the world said were powerless were what stood there in their own power from the margins to the center. Speaking in their own voice for themselves and that for me radically shifted my notion and my understanding of power."

"I think part of this work right now is each of us stepping into what it is that we are being called to, right, what is being downloaded to us. It may seem crazy, it may seem like oh  people are going to whatever but it's what you taught me right. We stand strong in who we are in our sacred center and we do what is ours to do. That is what my prayer is every morning, God what is mine to do? And the response is always do what I put in front of you today.