about
Jasmin Vélez is a Puerto Rican practitioner-scholar, organizer, and researcher rooted in Kensington, Philadelphia. Her work asks a single question in many forms: what does it look like for communities to stay, thrive, and determine their own futures on their own land?
She is Development & Communications Manager at Kensington Corridor Trust, Philadelphia's first neighborhood trust, which moves commercial property into community hands along Kensington Avenue.
As principal of Raíces Consulting LLC, she partners with land trusts, community organizations, cultural institutions, and funders on community-based research, oral history and archival projects, engagement design, and bilingual storytelling.
Jasmin is a PhD candidate in Geography, Environment & Urban Studies at Temple University. Her dissertation follows Puerto Ricans in Philadelphia and Puerto Rico through gentrification, displacement, and the vaivén of diaspora life.
She holds an M.A. in Medical Anthropology from the University of Colorado Denver, where she studied land and identity with multigenerational coffee-farming families in Puerto Rico.
Off the clock, she grows food as La Jardinera Boricua and writes Tending the Roots, a newsletter on land, memory, and the garden.
