By ARTHUR ALCOFF, age 13
“Yumi has enough hope and imagination and creativity to get us out. Holding on to hope is really important,” says Soledad Aguilar-Colon, a staff member at IndyKids. Yumi Rodriguez works within climate science and performative and visual arts. She is also a community organizer at the Climate Imaginarium, which is how I got to meet her.
Yumi was raised in Washington Heights and went to Columbia Climate School for her master’s degree in climate and society. Prior to that, she earned an associate of applied sciences in veterinary medicine.
She helps her community in many ways. She has made murals around the city symbolizing nature with the Audubon Mural Project. The murals are specifically of birds in order to raise awareness about endangered species and beautify neglected spaces. Even though she likes birds, she loves spiders. We know this because of her pet spider, Charlotte, who she introduced me to during our interview.
Yumi “wears many hats,” which is a saying for when people do a lot of different things. Sometimes she wears one hat, and other times she wears multiple. Sometimes she wears a top hat, like when she performs for a social circus project called Circ of Humankind, which encourages people to socialize. Yumi described her inspiration in a video performance from 2019, saying, “In many ways humanity has become a threat to itself, and so I’ve decided to take it upon myself to expose the thread that keeps humankind together again.”
