A climate culture-jammer, visual storytelling educator, and aspiring animator for social change, Ryan has devoted his organizing work to embodying rooted values of intersectional justice and anti-oppression. Camero’s activism originated from the needs of his hometown Stockton, California, to instill cross-cultural understanding and intergenerational harmony through the arts; fighting against apathy, illiteracy, systems perpetuating gang involvement and murder rates, poverty and lack of opportunity. Orchestrating arts/culture festival programming, facilitating youth-led DIY art exhibitions/benefit concerts, and assisting in community organizing work of local nonprofits led him to environmental advocacy, in which corporate privatization and irreversibly damaging the area’s ecological tapestry were issues that contributed to dysfunctions of not only his city, but of the state.
Since then, Ryan’s theory of change drove him to coalition building across the nonprofit sector- notable examples include working as a student facilitator for the California Student Sustainability Coalition, as a water rights campaigner with Restore the Delta, and as a storytelling educator for international arts-activist group, the Beehive Design Collective. He is a 2015 Brower Youth Award winner, the most prestigious award for young environmental leaders in the country, and represented California at COP21 – the international climate negotiations in Paris. Ryan holds close to his heart a passion for seeing creative external expression as a genuine form of navigating research and building healing resilience, and is currently in a metaphor-induced haze of translating hard-hitting issues of his home state into one of the Beehive’s graphics projects about California.
