Roslyn believes that lasting change — and our capacity to create just futures — is found at the intersection of imagination and rigor.
A community organizer, political educator, anti-racist facilitator, and Founding Executive Director of The People’s Place (TPP), Roslyn has spent the last 15 years co-creating and spearheading innovative projects that support working-class people of color to develop their leadership, organize their communities, and build power in the struggle against domination toward a world that upholds an unwavering reverence for life.
Working across several organizations, Roslyn is a skilled and tenacious change agent who quickly developed a reputation for alchemizing nascent ideas into tangible strategies for building power. As President of the Latin American Student Organization at UCONN-Waterbury, she first entered community change work through a partnership with the Hispanic Coalition, where she developed and piloted an afterschool youth program that combined academic support with anti-racist and anti-colonial education rooted in Puerto Rican and Black history, culture, and identity. At Waterbury Bridge to Success, Roslyn helped scale Waterbury’s first community-schools initiative, managing more than a dozen partnerships across five schools to connect students, families, and residents with critical wraparound services and community resources. She is a proud co-founder of the Waterbury Campaign School, a grassroots civic leadership and community organizing program that invites residents to examine how power operates in their city and explore multiple methods of social change, including the strengths and limitations of electoral politics. She also co-founded Colectivo Bámbula, a national collective of Diaspora Boricua creatives and educators who, through storytelling and popular education, aim to radicalize social consciousness, facilitate relational healing, and preserve memory and culture. She serves in community governance and cooperative spaces through organizations including the Whitneyville Cultural Commons and Cooperate Connecticut.
At TPP, Roslyn builds the infrastructure, relationships, and collective capacity necessary to build and wield power for systemic change. She leads a dynamic team of movement practitioners who work hand-in-hand with emerging organizers in meaningful place-making and justice-centered projects that strengthen the broader fights for social, racial, and economic justice at the municipal and state levels.
Deeply rooted in her Puerto Rican identity and her adopted home of Waterbury, Roslyn is committed to principled struggle and solidarity with all oppressed peoples in pursuit of self-determination, dignity, and liberation. She is happiest when surrounded by music and dance, breaking bread with chosen kin, and talking endlessly about her love of both film and live performance.