Magdalena Ayed, “Building Coastal Resilience By Impactful Community Engagement”
Building Coastal Resilience By Impactful Community Engagement is a lecture by Magdalena Ayed. In this talk, Magdalena, Executive Director, will discuss how Harborkeepers, a small grassroots coastal environmental advocacy non-profit is building coastal resilience in East Boston through impactful coastal programming, trust-based community engagement and through cross-sector partnership-building. The speaker will highlight the model of engagement they have developed that is breaking traditional urban planning ‘siloes’ and helping to foster critical connections that help build sustainable coastal resiliency.
The lecture will take place in the framework of the course: Spaces of Solidarity. The course aims at examining community-driven spaces and spatial processes that pool and share resources to build social cohesion in times of crisis or absence of government, at a variety of scales, places, and contexts. It also attempts to explore environments of community formation and open up a dialogue on the agency of design in enacting and facilitating actions of solidarity.
Magdalena Ayed is Founder and Director of The Harborkeepers, a start-up coastal resiliency and environmental advocacy organization in East Boston. Originally from Argentina, multi-lingual and with a degree in International Relations, Magdalena has acquired experience working in various sectors in New York, Boston and traveling abroad in countries like Brasil, Italy, Argentina, Algeria, and Ethiopia. Her past professional experience in diverse sectors such as international marketing, human rights and humanitarian aid, medical interpreting and environmental organizing has given her insights into creative urban problem-solving techniques and innovative community engagement skills. Magdalena’s passion for the Boston Harbor, local waterfront environmental issues, keen multi-cultural abilities and creativity has earned her support from the community as well as from partners and colleague across the board, support she leverages to advance city planning process that she hopes will have a lasting impact in creating resiliency and improving the communities in which she lives and works. She is also the film director of a documentary film called Destination East Boston that tells the story of 50 years of airport expansion and its impacts in East Boston.