Fernanda Lugo is an activist and community organizer in El Paso Texas, where she strives to raise awareness of nature-based creative solutions and build bridges between organizations local and national, emphasizing how all our struggles are connected. She works with the Alliance For Just Money, and has connections to the American Monetary Institute, Move to Amend and Citizens’ Climate Lobby, trying to grasp some expertise on community building to overcome the limitations of our current economic model.

Fernanda has a Master’s in biobehavioral health from Penn State, and experience in research in family health, health disparities as well as environmental health. She investigates and shares sustainable nature-based solutions and works to grow local social capital, by facilitating working groups to obtain grants that can help her community, and directly capacitating others to build and create, with creativity lost under the forces of capitalism. Her first singing tree, towards a Just and Democratic Economy, was completed for MAYDAY for Money and explores the power of money—but also barter and exchange—  and how these can help us meet the goals of a just society, with planetary wellbeing and optimized human health. She works towards a Just Transition with AFJM and works directly in local land restoration and peace building efforts. Fernanda hopes that these fields that sustain our ecological health can have access to livable wages, healthcare, and that people with disabilities can have dignified work. Fernanda practices and offers eco-crafts, and eco-exhale yoga in her local community through Eco El Paso and occasionally online. She is an avid learner of permaculture, foraging, herbalism, and languages. She is currently leading the Branches to Roots project, a STEAM curriculum project that fosters trees and climate action and hope.