Emily Coralyne Bishop
Project Manager
Portugal / Upstate New York
Emily Coralyne Bishop has been a water protector since her early days as an activist, organizing on major campaigns to ban fracking in New York State and California. She graduated from SUNY Purchase College in 2012 having studied Sociology, Community Development and Social Change with a focus on the politics and poetics of water.
Her summers in college were spent volunteering in a Kichwa Community in the Ecuadorian Amazon, learning about the impact of oil extraction on indigenous communities and their relationship to water. Her senior thesis involved a project where she was able to organize resources to rehabilitate a fresh water catchment and install piping into a new school that was built. The water was running the day that she left. When she asked, "What more can I do?" to a community elder, they told her to go back to where she was from, and make a change there.
In 2012, she joined New Yorkers Against Fracking as a regional organizer in her hometown of Syracuse, NY organizing Central New Yorkers to become politically involved to protect the state from fracking. She joined Neighbors of Onondaga Nation as an Assistant Project Manager for the Two Row Wampum Campaign, her first water pilgrimage. She helped organize 500 people, native and allies, to travel down the Hudson River in canoes & kayaks to honor the first treaty between settlers and the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. The Two Row Wampum represents these two peoples living side by side in peace and friendship, in perpetuity, and a promise that the settlers would protect the land they share.
After these campaigns, Emily became interested in a different kind of activism. She began exploring life in intentional communities and found the Work That Reconnects, from root teacher Joanna Macy. In 2016, she attended her first intensive with Joanna and also traveled to Portugal to visit Tamera, where she has since studied extensively and immersed herself in the vision for new culture and the possibilities of a healed relationship with land and water. Since then, she is on a strong path as a Work That Reconnects facilitator, a life coach for change makers, a virtual assistant, and is in a deep exploration around life in community.
She is part of the collective, Women of the Water, and is keen to walk the watersheds of the lands she comes to know, care for the water well on the land she currently lives on, and is in ongoing ceremony as a carrier of water.
Emily also serves the Rooted Global Village with Karine Bell helping shape important conversations like Queer Ecology as well as giving support to The School for the Great Turning with Lydia Violet.