Sendy VaughnSuazo
Profile
Sendy Vaughn Suazo is a first-generation Afrodescendant immigrant from Honduras. At an early age, she realized that there was an inequality of opportunities for children in families like hers and dedicated her life to finding more resources for her community through community organizing, policy development, politics, and education. Through a fellowship program with the Reebok Foundation and campaign in Human Rights, at the age of 13, she traveled to Russia to receive an International Film and Video award for her film Stop the Violence and Teen Pregnancy. Sendy has worked in different medias with Afrodescendant organizations in Honduras to support them. She created their SWOT analysis profile for international and local support. She has researched the Educational Impact of Transnationalism among Garinagu and Afrodescendants of Honduras. She is currently working on a national census of the Garinagu and Afrodescendants of Latin America and the Caribbean living in the United States.
Education
Endicott College
Master of Education in Organizational Management
Endicott College
Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies
Urban of Boston
Associate in Arts in Early Education
Awards and Accomplishments
2017 International Women Solidary Recipient
2017 Boston Housing Authority, Center for Community Engagement, Resident Empowerment
Child Development Associate (CDA)
Mass Department of Early Care & Education Licenses: Director I & II
Preschool Lead Teacher
Infant Toddler Lead Teacher
Research
Sendy concentrates on community-based research which investigates how transnationalism impacts educational outcomes in the Garifuna and Afro-descendant communities of Central America and the Caribbean. Through community forums, she gains a better understanding of how Garinagu/Garifuna and Afro-descendants communities from Guatemala, Honduras, Belize and Nicaragua received more educational resources and job opportunities outside their home countries. Members of these communities were then able to use the study’s data to create community forums in New York, Houston, Boston, and New Orleans. These questions became acute in 2014 when members from these communities, sometimes entire families, were fleeing out of Central America–specifically from Honduras and Guatemala–because of organized crime, unemployment, and micro farmland displacement. The future of this project can be used as a mechanism to support and assist the community in understanding the impact of large migrations as well as to assist and create a comprehensive grassroots community action plans to support sustainability and sovereignty through their own governance and social structures.
Selected Publications
Vaughn Suazo, S. (2018). Between Land, Water and Language: The Black Atlantic in Conversation with the Western Caribbean. Harvard University Black Portraiture.Retrieved from: http://www.blackportraitures.info/sessions/between-land-walter-and-language-the-black-atlantic-in-conversation-with-the-western-caribbean/
Jones, S. (1999). Simply Living: "The Spirit of the Indigenous People (p. 51). Novato, CA: New World Library.