Valerie Jameson
Valerie Jameson is a homegrown leader that was politicized at a young age growing up in Richmond, CA.
Seeing the material conditions of her family, friends, and neighbors ignited her passion for radical community transformation. Leading her to become a grassroots youth organizer, advocating for a number of social justice issues through a decolonial framework and community empowerment. Valerie has worked at all levels of the education sector, as a practitioner and teacher at West Contra Costa Unified School District, a college advisor, recruitment and retention specialist, and in college admissions with the motivation to help support the success of first-generation students of color in obtaining a degree. At the RYSE Center (where she was a youth leadership team member in 2008) Valerie’s role as the Education Justice Coordinator enabled her to lead a number of policy and community outreach initiatives to elevate youth participation and decision making at individual school sites and the district as a whole. She began engaging in land and housing efforts out of a need to help stabilize her neighborhood, combat displacement, and coordinate movement-building efforts that reclaim community control of land and housing. As the Director of Richmond LAND, she is responsible for weaving together community organizing efforts, affordable housing preservation efforts, and new development construction projects ideas within the community land trust model of stewardship that is driven by homegrown residents and benefits frontline community members. As an institutional change agent, she wants historically disenfranchised and dispossessed communities to benefit and thrive. Valerie graduated from UC Berkeley with a Bachelors in Ethnic Studies and Social Welfare.
