Highlights: Maya earned her Masters of Science in Social Work from the Columbia School of Social Work, focusing on International Social Welfare and Rights for Immigrants and Refugees through program design, research, and evaluation. Maya has spent her life learning to balance her passion for the arts and creativity, her love of research, and her need to build community through education and political participation. Throughout her academic career, she has taught low-income youth of color in different communities in the United States, has created interactive educational programming to address the negative effects of poverty, trauma, and structural oppression on attainment for students in marginalized communities, and has worked in mixed-methods research exploring how structural oppression impacts different aspects of life for black and brown Americans. This past fall, she interned at Glasgow Women’s Library, where she assisted in organizing a play by black and brown female survivors of intimate partner violence about their experiences with gendered violence in the United Kingdom. During the AIF Clinton Fellowship, Maya hopes to learn how to create sustainable programs collaboratively with youth that value them as knowledge holders and creators, through utilizing participatory program evaluations. In the future she plans to pursue doctoral study in how to utilize arts-based, qualitative, participatory action methods to combat the epistemicide of the knowledge that marginalized youth hold about the systems that oppress them.