Meet Aisha Rios (I-ee-sha), PhD (she/they)

Learning & Change Strategist

My name is Aisha Rios. I come from and am inspired by lineages of organizers, educators, storytellers, and agitators who I am proud to say have shaped who I am today. I identify as a Black mixed, able-bodied, queer cis woman — someone with privileges including being able-bodied, graduate school educated, with English as my first language living in Amerikkka.

I was born in Detroit, Michigan, and I am proud to have roots in a city with an important history and present for Black liberation struggles, as well as Detroit techno music! I have spent most of my life in the southern United States (mostly Gainesville, Florida and Atlanta, Georgia), but I also spent half a decade in both Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Denver, Colorado.

I have layered lived experiences of trauma and oppression in a racialized body and as a survivor of gender based violence within my family. These experiences plus the privilege afforded through proximity to whiteness — by being raised by a white bodied mother — has fostered a deep awareness of how intersecting social identities and lived experiences shape access and opportunities under neoliberal, settler, white supremacist capitalism.

The work I am most proud of has contributed to disrupting structural violence through grassroots organizing, both directly and in supporting other change agents.

My work is multi-disciplinary as a facilitator, organizer, budding artist, and reluctant anthropologist-evaluator. I see within my professional fields how dominant discourses and practices uphold neoliberal, patriarchal, capitalist, and imperialist power, and am committed to divesting from them.

In their place, I co-organize / facilitate containers for connecting, challenging, and creating, rooted in a politic of care. I’m especially passionate about intra- and inter-relational work within our movement spaces — the kind that helps us navigate conflict and harm. Across all that I am and do, I strive for an embodied, slower pace of being and laboring.

Building Coactive Change

While in graduate school, my first organizing work focused on the exploitation of overworked, underpaid adjuncts—by creating space for collective care, support, and connection. After graduate school, I spent several years as an external evaluator in consulting firms that worked with government, philanthropy, universities, and nonprofits until I founded Coactive Change in 2020.

Starting Coactive Change has meant having more agency over my time and emboldened me to create more space to organize against the carceral, settler colonial, and capitalistic institutions of the state.

The below quote from Abolition. Feminism. Now. speaks to the role I see “normative evaluative logics of success” play in subduing radical organizing and funneling it into the nonprofit industrial complex and reformist policy change work. A dynamic that I contributed to in the past and that I am now actively resisting through my work.

”Normative evaluative logics of success — a win is passing legislation, creating a policy or a large and permanent organization, something tangible or deliverable — are internalized, and sometimes produce shame: What did we even do? We failed.

But as abolition feminism reminds us, while changing laws and policies might be necessary it is never sufficient. In this ecology of abolition feminism, the slow and urgent time of movements means that some of the most critical relationships and shifts are often unrecognizable as ‘wins,’ but these rarely acknowledged and sinewy genealogies that tether movements and campaigns across time and place continue to spark freedom.”

— Angela Davis, Gina Dent, Erica R. Meiners, and Beth E. Richie, Abolition. Feminism. Now.

  • I am committed to serving in various leadership, mentorship, and organizing roles. Current roles include: community organizer with collectives focused on Black queer insurgent care, mutual and direct aid, and fighting for Black and Indigenous resistance and liberation; and seeding Radiate Collective with co-conspirator Yagna Nag Chowdhuri, a cohort-based political education and visioning container that creates space for radical reimagination, curiosity, experimentation, and political education.

    Former roles include: co-facilitator of the American Evaluation Association’s Local Affiliate Collaborative; former president of the Atlanta-area Evaluation Association; community organizer with a Black radical power-building collective, an abolitionist prisoner letter-writing organization, an abolition campaign, and political education networks; and member of the Denver Reimagining Police and Public Safety Task Force.

  • I bring over a decade of evaluation and applied anthropological research experience. I have co-led complex, multi-state and multi-community, U.S.-based projects focused on systems change, community care work, community organizing, and advocacy across many sectors and institutions. Current and former projects include the following content areas: Black single motherhood, prison industrial complex, grassroots organizing, coalition-building, organizational change, philanthropy and nonprofits, federal policy and funding, gender-based violence, HIV/AIDS and STD prevention, youth leadership, K-12 education, and older adult social services.

  • Prior to 2014, I spent nearly a decade conducting a U.S.-based ethnographic dissertation research project. My research explored feminist and anti-feminist discourses and practices within and across state advocacy and community coalition building in response to gender-based violence in a southern U.S. state. I explored multi-sector interpretations of and responses to gender-based violence within and across social services, state and legislative advocacy, the criminal punishment system, and community coalition organizing.

    I hold a PhD and MA in Sociocultural Anthropology from Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I have a BA in Anthropology from Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia.