Sebas and Santi making their favorite sandwich cake. 6/21/2021
Our Team
Naomi is the proud mother to Santiago and Sebastián. She has over 18+ years experience creating and directing national and international socially engaged art projects that bring people together to address social issues. She is the artist behind One Million Bones, a social practice work in which over 150,000 people from fifty states and thirty countries created over 1,000,000 handmade bones to address ongoing genocide and mass atrocities in Sudan, South Sudan, Congo, Myanmar, and Syria. In June of 2013, 1,018,260 bones were installed on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Currently, she is working on the project Of Grief & Dreams, a project created for individual and communal healing.
She is a TED Global Fellow, TED Senior Fellow, a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s Artist as Activist Fellow, a Carl Wilkens Fellow, and a recipient of an Arts and Healing Network Award.
Michael is the proud father to Sebastián and Santiago. He is a Native New Mexican and has been a nonprofit leader for over twenty years, working to bring people together to protect our land and water for future generations, like Sebas and Santi. Michael loves being outdoors and shares that passion with Naomi and the boys every chance he gets: whether hiking or riding bikes along the irrigation ditches near their house, going camping and kayaking, teaching the boys how to fish, or simply playing ball in the front yard. He is an avid gardener and one of his favorite things is watching Sebas and Santi harvest and eat fresh tomatoes off the vine or fruit off the trees they planted together. Michael is committed to public service and has served on numerous volunteer boards. He is a W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Leadership Network Fellow. He now realizes that his decades of advocacy experience has all been in preparation for this journey: to find a cure for Sebastián’s cancer.
Rachel has been connected to Michael and Naomi’s family since 2005 and has been an honorary “tia” to Sebastián and Santiago since they were born. Rachel was born and raised in Albuquerque, where the majority of her family resides. She has spent many weekends and holidays with Michael, Naomi, Sebas, and Santi sitting around a campfire with extended family and friends playing “washas” and witnessing the boys grow, rough and tumble, zoom around on their bikes, jump on their trampoline, and point out the moon and the first night star, well before the adults noticed them. Rachel considers Michael and Naomi to be the glue of a community that they have helped to grow and nourish. In her professional life, Rachel co-founded Enlace Comunitario in 1999, a domestic violence organization, and in 2005 founded El CENTRO de Igualdad y Derechos, a non-profit formed to support the integration of longstanding immigrants in New Mexico. Rachel brings 23 years of fundraising, organizational development, program and campaign development, and policy advocacy experience to the board.