Orion Camero is a queer Filipinx visual storytelling educator, anticapitalist, coalition-builder and community organizer. As a genderqueer (they/him/hers) honoring the balance between sacred masculinity and divine femininity, they work at the nexus of social, ecological, and economic crisis to enable holistic perspectives in advancing transcendent justice. With roots in Cebu and Pangasinan while having been born and raised in Stockton, Orion hopes to honor their decolonial and activist lineages--honoring ancestors from the Central Valley farmworkers’ movements to indigenous resistance against Spanish and eventually American empire in their homeland.

 

Orion has worked locally, statewide, nationally and globally across movements for climate justice, notably as a 2015 Brower Youth Award winner for advocacy work against water privatization in California. Their ancestral journey began as a youth delegate and creative mobilizations organizer to COP21, the international climate talks in Paris where the largest globally binding agreement on climate change was signed. Having heard painful stories from communities on the frontlines of the typhoons and learning of the Philippines as the third most impacted country to climate change, Orion felt called to recover and connect to their culture and was brought on his soul-search to the Center of Babaylan Studies. Since then, they have organized at COP22 in Morocco, COP23 in Germany, and around the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco as a rapid response arts-activist strategizing on impactful visual messaging to center grassroots communities and call out the root causes of the climate crisis, capitalism, and colonialism.

 

Orion is a 2017-18 Spiritual Ecology fellow for their work as one of the stewards of imagineering the California Allegory project of the Beehive Design Collective, a global arts activist collective that translate movement stories into pen-and-ink fable murals. This year, they will be co-leading the SustainUS delegation of US youth (centering indigenous leadership and a decolonial vision of organizing) to the United Nations climate talks, COP25, in Santiago, Chile. Orion believes that what nurtures the heart of collective liberation are the ingredients of inter-identity solidarity, cross-cultural connection and exponential collaboration.