Kensington, Philadelphia

Practitioner-scholar rooted in land justice, environmental equity & decolonial community practice

I am a Puerto Rican community organizer, nonprofit fundraiser, and doctoral researcher building toward futures where communities stay, thrive, and determine their own destinies on their own land. Before you expand, you tend the roots.

land justice environmental equity decolonial organizing practitioner-scholar Kensington Corridor Trust Raíces Consulting Temple University · PhD

currently

organizing & fundraising

Development & Communications Manager

Kensington Corridor Trust

consulting

Founder & Principal Consultant

Raíces Consulting LLC

research

Doctoral Researcher

Geography, Environment & Urban Studies · Temple University

about

Jasmin Velez is a Puerto Rican practitioner-scholar, community organizer, and nonprofit fundraiser rooted in Kensington, Philadelphia. With over a decade of experience at the intersection of land justice, environmental equity, and decolonial community practice, she brings rigorous research and deep relational trust-building to every room she walks into.

She serves as Development & Communications Manager at Kensington Corridor Trust, a pioneering neighborhood trust model that moves commercial property into community hands along Kensington Avenue. She is also the founder of Raíces Consulting LLC and a doctoral researcher in Geography, Environment & Urban Studies at Temple University.

Her work asks a single question in many forms: what does it look like for communities to stay, thrive, and determine their own futures on their own land?

10+

years in community organizing & environmental justice

consulting

Sowing

Individual & 1:1

Professional development, coaching, and strategy for individual practitioners and emerging organizers.

Pollinating

Group & coalition

Community engagement facilitation, coalition strategy, and participatory program design.

Cultivation

Organizational

Sustained fundraising, communications, and community engagement strategy for nonprofits and foundations.

land & roots

I have always loved growing things.
The work taught me what I was doing.

Growing was never something I came to — it was already in me. What the organizing work gave me was language for what I had always known: that to tend a garden is an act of resistance, of care, of joy, of history, of culture. Of refusal and abundance at the same time.

La Jardinera Boricua is my ongoing account of that relationship — learning to grow, to save seeds, to cook from what the soil gives, to understand the land not as a concept but as something you know in your hands and your body. It started in a row home in Kensington, in containers on a stoop, in every inch of space I could find. It is still becoming.

This is not a credential. It is a practice. And the learning is ongoing.

La Jardinera Boricua

@lajardineraboricua

Growing things. Saving seeds. Cooking from the garden. Learning what it means to tend the land as a Puerto Rican woman.

follow along

seed saving

Keeping the lineage alive

Saving seeds is an act of memory. Every tomato, every pepper, every flower returned to envelope is a small refusal of dependence — and a bet on next season.

cooking from the garden

From soil to table

Growing what you eat changes your relationship to food, to labor, to abundance and scarcity. The kitchen is part of the garden. They are not separate rooms.

environmental justice

Why growing is political

Access to land, clean soil, seeds, and space to grow are environmental justice issues. The garden is not separate from the research. It is the research, lived.

"Growing was never something I came to — it was already in me. What the organizing work gave me was language for what I had always known: that to tend a garden is an act of resistance, of care, of joy, of history, of culture. Of refusal and abundance at the same time."

where it deepened

Puerto Rico & the coffee farmers

Before I had my own garden, I spent time in Puerto Rico with multigenerational coffee farming families — listening to how they talked about land, labor, and identity across generations shaped by colonial dispossession. I was there as a researcher. I left as something else.

What those conversations gave me was an understanding that the relationship to land is never just agricultural. It is ancestral, political, and deeply personal — especially for Puerto Rican families for whom land has been taken, managed, and legislated by outside forces for over a century.

La Jardinera Boricua is, in part, my attempt to work that out in my own hands.

MA thesis

Reimagining the Jíbaro: Postcolonial Identity in Puerto Rico and the Specialty Coffee Market

15 interviews with multigenerational coffee farming families. University of Colorado Denver, 2017.

writing & public scholarship

Community Centric Fundraising

Gentrification: When neighborhood changes aren’t shaped by us and are no longer for us.

Public scholarship · Philadelphia

Academic

Spatial Solidarties at the PRSA 2024 - From History to Group Chats: Exploring Resistance Across Geographies & Space

Temple University · in progress

Dissertation

Digital archive · coming soon

Kensington, Philadelphia

Teaching

Sustainable Cities · Temple University

Instructor of record · asynchronous

get in touch

Let's connect.

Whether you're interested in working together through Raíces, reaching out about research, or connecting around shared work in land justice and environmental equity — I'd love to hear from you.

jasminvelezg@gmail.com LinkedIn · Jasmin Velez @lajardineraboricua · La Jardinera Boricua Philadelphia, PA

Academic CV available on request. Reaching out about fellowship applications, academic collaborations, or research partnerships? I'm happy to share my full CV — just drop me a note.

Raíces Consulting

Plant with intention. Grow with community.

Available for community engagement strategy, grant writing, fundraising support, and program development. Sliding scale available for grassroots organizations.

Practitioner-scholar rooted in land justice, environmental equity & decolonial community practice

Raíces Consulting LLC

Tending the Roots