YakimaChange

Confirmed Speakers

• HollyAnna DeCoteau Pinkham
  HollyAnna is a member of the Yakama Nation. Also of Nez Perce, Umatilla & Cree Nations ancestry. Employed by Homeland Security ~ Emergency Management as an Emergency Management Planner. Currently in her twenty-fifth year of employment in the field of Public Safety, has served as Wildland Firefighter, Structural Firefighter, Emergency Medical Technician, Search and Rescue, Police Officer. A four time cancer survivor, advocate for Rural Health care, Sovereign Rights, Indigenous Rights, Social Justice and intellectual Property. She is also a Professional Artist, Musician: Medicine Fiddle, Metis Fiddler, Classical Violin, makes and plays her own Traditional flutes, Indian Language Instuctor, hunts, fishes, beadworker, basket maker and loves roller derby. She was recently named Ambassador to the Aymara Nation.
• Ryan Crafts
  Ryan moved 3000 miles to Yakima from the Gulf Coast days after graduating med school. He grew deep roots in this fertile, diverse community and after residency, had to stay. After working nearly 7 years in the "real world" at a local hospital-owned clinic, he started donating medical care to people through an email-house call concierge type system. The last 2.5 years he has volunteered full time at the Union Gospel Mission's free medical clinic. Life as a clinician is very different inside a clinic powered by micro donations and gifts. The contrast between the real world and the barrier-free UGMC is, in a way, "too good to be true". Between clinics, he enjoys growing food and dreaming up novel ways to create abundance.
• Robert V. Taylor
  Robert believes that disillusionment should be welcomed in our lives as an incubator of new thinking, renewed purpose and personal growth. He believes that embracing disillusionment allows us to step beyond the assumptions which enclose us from imagination, creativity and compassion. Robert is a Thought Leader, Author, Teacher and Speaker.
• Yesenia Navarrete Hunter
  Yesenia believes in Building Community through Participatory Music! Yesenia Navarrete Hunter was raised in the Yakima Valley in a migrant family and spent her spring and summer days harvesting vegetables and berries alongside her siblings. Yesenia shares her story of how belonging to a group of people that practices participatory music shapes community, family, and the sense of self.