Janessa Waiters

Project: Developing an organization to provide peer counseling, mediation, healing and social events for domestic care workers in Harlem.

Janessa Waiters is a former nanny with more than 15 years of experience in the domestic care work industry. She will share that care work journey in the forthcoming zine Fussifier (2022). Janessa remains in the care sector, engaging in energy healing work and workshop facilitation. She holds a Bachelor of the Arts from The City College of New York, having majored in Sociology and Psychology while a Beyond Identity fellow, researching Black women survivalists. Janessa is currently the Fellowship Director at Beyond Identity a program to train queer and women identified students from marginalized and or immigrant communities in identity-driven research, allowing them to draw on lived experiences of discrimination and violence to inform the research agendas and political writing that will be the foundation of distinctive political projects. Working toward liberation with organizations such as the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Audre Lorde Project, and Civil Liberties Public Policy, Janessa agrees with Toni Morrison that motherhood was “the most liberating thing that ever happened to [her].

Bundles Community Scholars Lecture: Who Cares about Care Workers and Educators? Leveraging Wellness to Close the Racial Health Gap (December 6, 2022)