Emy Takinami (she/her) is the Racial Justice Policy and Community Engagement Manager at the FXB Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard. As a macro social worker and community organizer, she is committed to building and fostering grassroots power toward community-led social change. She is currently a steering committee member of Boston Liberation Health, a group of social workers dedicated to understanding and practicing social work using the Liberation Health framework, a model of radical mental health practice that helps individuals identify and analyze the sociopolitical factors affecting our lives and to take action to change our external world.

Before joining the FXB Center, Emy served as the Policy and Community Organizing Director at Zero Debt Massachusetts, a new non-profit that she helped start up, dedicated to the abolition of student debt and transformation of the higher education system here in Massachusetts through community organizing and grassroots advocacy. She also worked as a college access advisor for first-generation, low-income students at the non-profit, Steps to Success, and currently serves on their Board of Directors.

Emy received her B.A. in Psychology and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies from the University of Vermont, and holds a dual Master’s Degree in Social Work and Educational Leadership and Policy Studies from Boston University.