Jaylin Celina Ward-Ayodeji is a storyteller and Osun priest from the Bronx, New York living in Baltimore, Maryland. From their background in ethnographic journalism to co-founding Generation Green and leading digital organizing at the New Economy Coalition, Ward understands that the stories we tell ourselves shape our capacity to imagine our future.
Today, Jaylin is expanding this capacity as a board member of Scalawag Magazine and strategic communications consultant at her firm Osunlewa Records.
+ curriculum vitae.
Education Interdisciplinary Journalism
Howard University
Bachelors of Art 2021
Certification Community Ownership and Workplace Democracy CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies 2026
Spanish Universidad del Oaxaca 2018 EmploymentDirector of Strategic Communications and Programs
New Economy Coalition 2022-2026
Director of Diaspora Organizing and Media
Generation Green 2020-2022
Robina Franklin Williams Editorial Intern
Council on Foreign Relations 2020
Consultant
Discovery Education 2019
Editorial Intern
The Atlantic 2019
PublicationsLoving Corrections for Captive Maternals Laboring in Movement (tm) 2026
The New Economy Roundup
October 2022 to March 2026
Environmental Liberation Manifesto
2021
Remembering the Invasion: The Stories of Afro-Antillean Panamanians
April 15, 2022
A Return to Panama October 7, 2021
Skills
Strategic Communications
Group Facilitation
Investigative Journalism
Ethnographic Research
Strategic Planning
Workplace Democracy
Cooperative Development
Adobe Creative Suite
Canva
Airtable
Google Analytics
Google and Microsoft Suite
Digital and Analog Photography
Events Field to Feed: Ethnographic Approaches for Reporting on the Solidarity Economy June 16, 2026
Through the Portal
Speech: There Are Solidarity Economies All Around Us September 2025
We Fund Us: Five Years Since the Uprisings May 28, 2025
10 Times a Rapper Said Something Lowkey Revolutionary February 2025
Power Shift Network Social Media Planning Workshop 2024
Black August: An Exploratory Conversation with Barred Business August 29, 2023
Environmental Liberation Roundtables: Environmental Liberation and Diaspora Organizing December 3, 2021
This communications training for solidarity economy movement workers demonstrated how to use ethnographic methods to support archiving their work and how to prioritize participatory design over algorithmic reward in the content production process. Drawing from Zora Neale Hurston’s fieldwork, Emily Kawano’s imaginal cell framework, and Edouard Glissant’s theory on rhizomes and opacity, participants taught me about their organizing lineages, and I taught them how to apply ethnography for the purposes of storytelling on social media and beyond.
Coming Soon: Standing on Business will be a recurring show on all Generation Green platforms.Standing on Business: Global Afrodescedants at SB 64
Generation Green + Global Afrodescendants Climate Justice Collaborative
As a social media consultant to Generation Green, the political home of the Gen-Z Environmental Liberation Movement, I developed a social media strategy for their delegation to the UNFCC SB 64 in Bonn, Germany and the co-inciding Afrodescendant Trans-Atlantic Strategy Convening.
Trinice “Iya Fabunmi” McNally-Hair is a mother, titled priest, PhD student, awarded activist, holistic wellness coach, and LGBTQ+ advocate within HBCUs.
I act as a public relations coach and communications consultant to her brand and digital community From the Waters.
Black Solidarity Economy 201 (2026) New Economy Coalition and Resource Generation
Black Solidarity Economy 201 teaches high net-wealth individuals organized within Resource Generation about the legacies of Black solidarity economy organizing and enters them into a giving circle to contribute to the Black Solidarity Economy Fund.
I served as an advisor to the program in my tenure at the New Economy Coalition. My research on the role of Black fraternal orders and secret societies in building the Underground Railroad as infrastructure for emancipation and the First Cooperative Era in Black History which proves resilient against the Panic of 1907 was proposed to be featured in the curriculum. Resisting Capitalism: Black Mutual Aid History Resource List (February 28, 2026) New Economy Coalition
Whether free or fugitive, Black people have built intra-communal and geographically connected mutual aid networks that made a way for escape and collective protection from state sanctioned violence. As early as 1780, membership in a social club, fraternal order, or benevolent society guaranteed a route to freedom from enslavement, healthcare, autonomy, support in times of crisis, and organized labor.
The New Economy Roundup is the flagship newsletter for the New Economy Coalition, a solidarity economy membership network of over 200 organizations throughout Abya Yala. In my position as the Director of Strategic Communications and Programs, I led curation, writing, and editing from 2023 to 2026.
In collaboration with NEC member, Motherful, I researched, designed, and wrote this viral explainer on commuity ownership models throughout the United States. This post supported Motherful with a fundraising campaign, social media editorial, and SEO.
This is my favorite strategy for membership organizing, strategic communications, and online political education.
The 2020 Uprisings stimulated unprecidented philanthropic investment in Black political and educational projects critiquing race, gender, and class within social movements. However, as early as 2021, that funding began to dwindle when grants were not renewed and other promises were walked back. These outcomes are also exacerbated by policy in the second Trump administration.
We Fund Us encouraged high-net wealth individuals to keep investing in the Black Solidarity Economy Fund and further their political education within communities of practice like Resource Generation. Jab Jab is Protest Black Solidarity Economy Fund
This video explainer shares the history of Labor Day’s Jab Jab and Mas performances as theatrical resistence. Through this story, I move to assert that labor resistance movements should include a deeper understanding of enslavement as labor extraction and wage theft and should furthermore support epistemic diversity in critical resistance forms.
This video is foundational to the Black Solidarity Economy Fund’s lens on reparation and expansion of the fund from North America to Abya Yala and eventually the entire African Diaspora.
Precious: Birthing Doula (2020) Final Project for “Black Thought in the Diaspora” at Howard University This photo-documentary is an extension of the applications of revolutionary feminist thought through the act of birthing. Our subject and narrator is Precious Swinton, a doula, singer/songwriter, reproductive rights activist, and my friend.
“Growing up, I did not know how we could spend money on gold pendants with the Panamanian flag engraved on them when the government represented by those colors have caused such strife. I couldn’t understand why my elders immigrated to the country that killed their peers and controlled them from afar. But it was less about revenge, and rather a journey for self-determination.“
Editorial Promotional Shoot for Kwanzaa Campaign (2021)
Generation Green
Generation Green is an ecosystem that fosters diasporic organizing to realize Environmental Liberation (EL) throughout the Global Black/African diaspora.
This digital popular education explainer is one of my earliest theorizations on the role of colonialism and imperialism on climate change and environmental racism. This research shapes the organization’s Environmental Liberation Manifesto and framework for diaspora organizing. It also taught me about the importance of digital accessibility in design which is further developed in my tenure at the New Economy Coalition.