Ep 13: 'All About Love: New Visions' w Anjali Rodrigues

Today’s guest is someone Colin had the pleasure of meeting over a decade ago, as a grad student in USF’s Urban Education and Social Justice M.A. Teaching Program. Dr. Patrick Camangian introduced the two and today's guest shortly after became Colin's cooperating and Mentor Teacher at a Leadership 6-12 in Richmond, CA. Since then, they have and continue to bond over teaching, music, and aims to grow our communities, critical consciousness, hearts, and spirits, amidst systems that attempt to stamp each and every one of these out. C adores this dear sister and is honored to have her on 'The Paper Plane' today, to discuss one of the powerful books of our generation, in bell hooks’ “All About Love: New Visions.”

Anjali Rodrigues is a first-generation Indian-American, an eldest daughter, an educator, a leadership and community organizing trainer, and a fútbol enthusiast. While studying at UCLA, she worked as a writing counselor in the Community Programs Office, where she discovered the campus’s rich legacy of organizing—particularly the role of the Black Panthers.

After graduating, Anjali began her teaching career in Richmond, California, and deepened her political development through the People’s Education Movement and Teachers for Social Justice. In 2015, she earned her master’s in Arts in Education from Harvard, where she also began teaching public narrative and community organizing alongside Dr. Marshall Ganz.

From 2014 to 2022, Anjali taught in K–12 schools in Boston and Brownsville, New York, while simultaneously leading workshops on public narrative and organizing for organizations across the country. Her collaborators have included Stand Up Indiana, the Sunrise Movement, March For Our Lives, Vital Voices, re:power, and many more.

She also founded the WARMTH Fellowship, a leadership program for young femmes of color (ages 15–29) that centers storytelling, peer coaching, and community care.

Currently, Anjali serves as Deputy Director of Fellowships at Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice, where she leads the Social Change Fellowship—a year-long program for undergraduates in the City University of New York system who are interested in pursuing social movement work.

The Paper Plane is a podcast created and hosted by Colin Masashi Ehara, where he interviews people he is blessed and honored to share community with, and asks them about a book(s) that have had a transformational impact on their lives. In a society where literacy rates are steadily declining and a growing number of podcasts hosted by cishet men, un/consciously champion expressions of masculinity that come at the expense of women, femmes, and LGBTQIA2S+ (especially BIPOC) folx, this space aims to operate as a counter-narrative.

The Paper Plane is a space that intends to highlight the dire importance of relationships, community, dialogue, perpetual learning, honest expression as art, art as honest expression, and freedom for literacy and literacy for freedom. It speaks to planes of existence attached to the act of reading, but also as a metaphor for the “flights” we take as we sit in what Ta-Nehisi Coates calls “a one way interface” as readers, and how these “journeys” shape us...