Gery Paredes Vásquez

Gery Paredes Vásquez (ella, tu, she, her), is a lifelong practitioner and collaborator for intersectional justice, healing and collective liberation.
She is currently the Race and Gender Equity Director at YWCA Madison, in which role she collaborates with her beloved team and a growing community of artists, advocates, organizers, educators and practitioners in the co-creation of offerings such as the Racial Justice Series Community Series, YWCA Madison’s annual Racial Justice Summit, as well as intersectional race-based offerings such as the BIPOC Healing Justice and Co-Liberation Series. In her work, she also provides collaborative consulting services for equity to organizations via YWCA Madison’s Creating Equitable Organizations partnership program.

Like many Latinx people, Gery was born to families of mixed ethnicities and races due to colonization: Indigenous Quechua, Aymara and Guarani with Spanish. This reality shapes her personal journey of learning, unlearning and healing as well as continues to inspire her work for intersectional justice and collective liberation every day. In the twenty years of her professional practice, Gery has collaborated with people, communities, and organizations from around the world. These experiences gave her the opportunity to co-create programs, build capacity and co-facilitate learning experiences that deliberately centered social justice with young and adult populations from a very broad range of race, ethnic, gender, socioeconomic and ideological identities in countries such as Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, United States, Swaziland, Netherlands, Sweden, Spain and Italy. Gery has served as the Co-Curricular Director of United World College in Costa Rica, presided over the International Association for Experiential Education, as well as co-founded the community organization Wayna Hilaña Yanapaña together with youth peers in her home country of Bolivia.

She is a graduate of the United World College of India, where she received a full scholarship to participate in a two-year multicultural and international residential experience centering education for peace while living and learning with two hundred peers from eighty-two countries. She received a bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Social Justice Education from Prescott College, and continues to participate in multiple community-based learning, unlearning, and practice experiences that continue to shape her ongoing journey.