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Rooted in the traditions of resistance and care in Chicago’s neighborhoods, Juanita is dedicated to transforming conditions in the hood, not just talking about them. Her work centers Black youth, multilingual learners, system-impacted families, and everyday people who are too often left out of policy conversations but live with the consequences of disinvestment, policing, and structural racism. Through community-based teaching, organizing, and facilitation, she helps people connect personal experience to larger systems—and then move from analysis to action.​

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Across higher education and community spaces, Juanita has led large-scale grants and program efforts, including managing multi-million-dollar federally funded initiatives such as a DHSI Title V diverse teacher pipeline and a Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad program. This work has included designing performance monitoring and continuous-improvement systems, providing technical assistance and coaching to cross-functional teams, and building institution-wide linguistic support programs that honor students’ home languages and cultures as assets. In addition, Juanita designs and teaches practice-based coursework for future bilingual teachers and facilitates professional learning focused on anti-racist, culturally and linguistically responsive practice for educators, leaders, and community partners.​

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As a facilitator and organizer, Juanita creates political education and professional learning spaces that break down complex issues like the school-to-prison pipeline, abolition, language justice, and community safety into strategies that schools and neighborhoods can actually use. She collaborates with local organizers, educators, and mutual aid networks to build block-level solutions—such as court support, healing discussions, and youth leadership pipelines that see young people as thinkers, strategists, and culture shifters. Grounded in a “nothing about us without us” ethic, her work insists that the people closest to the problem hold the wisdom to design the solutions.​

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At the heart of Juanita’s work is a commitment to young people and the adults who serve them: helping principals, teachers, and staff translate equity into daily decisions; using data as a tool for learning rather than punishment; and creating environments where students in historically disinvested communities experience rigor, care, and affirmation. Across roles—teacher, program leader, organizer, and community member—Juanita is dedicated to honoring hood knowledge, defending Black and Brown life, and building the kind of radical, everyday solidarity that makes liberation feel possible in both schools and on the block right now."