Rozette
FROM SURVIVING TO BUILDING WORLDS THAT HOLD US ALL
A Story of Migration, Truth-Telling, and Radical Community Work
"Storytelling is a practice in reclaiming the parts of ourselves that made it this far."
Rozette de Castro arrived in the United States from Negros Occidental, Philippines, at 18. By 23, she was a college student, a community organizer, and unknowingly standing at the beginning of a decade-long journey that would take her across fellowships, nonprofit boardrooms, graduate school, conservation projects, and finally to New York, where she now designs workshops, holds community gatherings, and teaches people how to tell their own stories.
This is not a traditional career story. It is a story about what happens when someone stops running from who they are and starts building a world shaped by their truths.
THE ORIGIN STORY
A Blank Piece of Paper Changed Everything
The Retreat That Rewired Her Mind
During college, Rozette was part of PASS — Pilipinx Academic Student Services, a student organization at UC Berkeley dedicated to creating recruitment and retention programs for Filipino-Americans seeking higher education. It was demanding, personal, and high-stakes work. Twelve 20-somethings, all full-time students, building programs meant to make college more accessible for people who looked like them: immigrants, first-generation students, low-income families.
One weekend, the staff went on a retreat. Rozette expected a bonding trip. What she got was the first real reckoning with her own story.
The Life Story Map
The facilitators gave everyone coloured paper and art materials and asked them to map their life journeys, from the very beginning to the present. The questions were meant to uncover why the work at PASS mattered on a values level. Who were you before this? How did you get here? What carried you to this moment?
Rozette stared at her blank paper and felt nothing come. It had only been five years since she moved from the Philippines. So much was still heavy: her sense of identity, her grief, her uncertainty about where she fit in the Filipino diaspora. She was 23 and still very much nursing the wound of how different life had become since leaving Negros.
"I didn't know where my story began, and I didn't know what to do with the nerves and mushy feelings that I was starting to feel."
When the Walls Came Down
Rozette signed up for the last time slot to share. As each person went before her, sharing their migration stories, family separations, reunions that had turned bittersweet, she felt something in her loosen. There were tears. Some silences held weight. And with each share, she started feeling more seen, more connected.
When her turn finally came, her paper was no longer blank. She had pasted her father's business card, the only physical thing she had that connected her to him at that time, and began sharing. Her childhood in Negros. The family separations. The bittersweet reunions. The confusion of becoming someone new in a country that wasn't hers yet.
In that one weekend, Rozette became a firm believer in the power of storytelling as a tool for community building.
"A community grounded in their truths has a more solid ground to walk on. It's been 10 years since that retreat, and the relationships I built there are still very much a part of my life."
THE PHILOSOPHY
What Makes a Story Actually Create Change
Truth as the Foundation
Rozette's philosophy around storytelling is rooted in a single belief: nothing built on anything less than love and truth will survive. A mentor once told her, 'What isn't built on love and truth will always collapse, and she has seen this play out again and again in her decade of community work.
She describes how a polished, confident story that lacks genuine depth eventually breaks. The person telling it starts to feel empty. Without something real threading them to their core, they lose their grounding. That emptiness gets projected outward into the communities they are supposed to serve.
Vulnerability as the Engine
For Rozette, the more vulnerable you are with people, the more open they are to trusting you. Honesty and softness are not weaknesses in her framework — they are the very things that make a story worth listening to. They are what allow people to fully see you. And when people fully see you, they trust you. When they trust you, change becomes possible.
"Your honesty is what sets you apart from the next charismatic influencer. Your depth is the roots that hold you firmly as you go through the many different tests that life sends your way."
This is what Rozette means when she says she wants her work to come from her chest, felt before it is spoken. Because that's the kind of story people never forget.
A Neurodivergent Mind That Sees Patterns
Something Rozette has learned about herself over the last decade is that she is neurodivergent. The way she makes sense of the world is through identifying patterns and connections between things. This, she believes, is why her path through social impact work has been so wide, moving across immigration research, education access, public health, environmental policy, technology, and urban planning.
Everywhere she looked, she found the same threads. Every policy enacted in the world is by design and is deeply personal; it touches every single aspect of a person's life. Her healthcare access was better than her mother's because of the type of insurance their respective jobs provided. Her presence in the United States was tied directly to immigration policies enacted before she was born. Her identity as a Filipino-American was not incidental; it was shaped by systems.
From that understanding, she developed a way of telling personal stories that are always in conversation with broader social and policy landscapes. Her individual journey became a map with policy markers, pins that explained how she ended up where she did and what she now feels called to change.
"We are currently living in someone else's imagination, and that imagination did not have my identity in mind. With the knowledge I hold now of how every single thing in my environment is by design, I am filled with conviction that I can redesign my environment towards a more loving and caring one."
THE WORK
Workshops, Third Spaces & Radical Imagination
How Workshops Are Born
Rozette does not sit down and formally plan her workshops from scratch. They emerge in bursts, from conversations with friends, from participating in someone else's event, from a sudden idea that hits her in the middle of a walk. She carries a journal with her everywhere, and when an idea arrives, she writes it down. Then it haunts her until she executes it.
Before any workshop takes shape, she asks herself a series of questions:
Why do I want to do this?
What am I envisioning would happen?
Is this still connected to my values?
Are my motives coming from within me or outside of me?
The answers to those questions become the story description that anchors each workshop, and the marketing materials, written from that honest place, are what attract the right participants.
The Grief Scavenger Hunt
This workshop, one of Rozette's most distinctive creations, takes participants through a cemetery with handwritten maps and a series of pauses and side quests designed to bring them face to face with their grief. Every stop along the route was tested by Rozette herself before the event, walking each path, sitting with each question, taking notes on what emotions came up.
She made one deliberate choice that speaks to her attention to psychological detail: every instruction was handwritten. Research shows that handwritten materials command a different kind of focus than printed or digital ones. Seeing another person's handwriting reminds the mind of the effort placed into the material, and that, she believes, makes participants take the experience more seriously.
The cemetery itself was not chosen arbitrarily. It was chosen because the space already carries the weight of memory and mortality. Walking through it primes people emotionally to meet their grief rather than avoid it. The location is a supporting character in the story Rozette is telling.
Intergenerational Conversations Workshop
This workshop was hosted at a public library, specifically because libraries are among the few truly multigenerational public spaces left. They hold everyone: children, teenagers, adults, and elders. They signal that regardless of who you are, you are welcome.
The theme of the workshop centred on encouraging strangers to talk to other strangers across generational lines. The library was not just a logistical choice; it was a philosophical one, chosen because its very existence reinforces the message Rozette was trying to send.
Collaging Sessions
Art-based and tactile, collaging workshops offer participants a non-verbal entry point into truth-telling. Cutting, arranging, and layering images allows people to begin expressing parts of their story before they have the words for it. These sessions serve as a gentle on-ramp to the deeper emotional work Rozette facilitates.
The Role of Third Spaces
For Rozette, a third space is not just a venue. It is a medium. She believes that spaces and feelings go hand in hand, and that where a workshop happens directly shapes how open participants are willing to be. When she chooses a space, she is asking: Does this place already carry some of the emotional resonance I want to create?
A cemetery for grief work. A public library for intergenerational dialogue. An urban farm for conversations about food, culture, and belonging. Each space becomes a collaborator in the work, setting the tone before a single word is spoken.
Measuring Impact Beyond Feedback Forms
Rozette does not measure the impact of a workshop through post-event surveys alone. She tracks ripple effects. The most meaningful sign that something worked is when participants come back, and when they bring updates about what happened after.
She hears about friendships formed at a grief scavenger hunt. She sees people return to her next workshop, visibly more open than they were the first time. She watches participants grow into more confident versions of themselves across sessions, as if she is witnessing the long arc of someone becoming who they were meant to be.
"You kind of see changes in their confidence and openness after every interaction. It's as if I'm seeing each person grow into their best versions in a span of the hours they're with me."
THE POLICY WORK
When a Personal Story Changed the Plan
Conservation Nonprofit and the App Proposal
Before moving to New York, Rozette worked at a conservation nonprofit on a team called Trash Free Seas, focused on finding solutions to keep trash out of the ocean. For a 26-year-old who had once dreamed of being the Secretary-General of the United Nations, it felt like a step toward the international impact work she had always wanted.
Her mentors at this organization consistently pushed her to bring her personal experience into her research. They encouraged her to draft analyses that included herself, and as it turned out, that personal grounding was exactly what made her policy work effectively.
The Philippines App Problem
The team was building a policy playbook for Southeast Asian governments on waste management. One proposal for the Philippines was to create a smartphone app that people could use during beach cleanups across the archipelago.
Rozette, having grown up in a coastal town in Negros, immediately saw the problem. Phones, let alone reliable internet, are not accessible in large parts of the Philippines. A tech-first solution would work for a narrow slice of the population and exclude the coastal communities that needed it most.
She built a counter-argument rooted in her lived experience and presented it to her supervisor. The proposal was revised. Her story became the driver for the team to be more intentional about context and access in all their projects, whether in fisheries, waste management, or climate work.
"Regardless of it being fisheries, waste management or climate related, my work always had a social justice lens that's packaged in a storytelling format."
URBAN PLANNING & CLIMATE JUSTICE
The Intersection of Migration, Climate, and Design
From Belonging to Being and Becoming
During graduate school, Rozette undertook a public thesis project that became the clearest articulation of her values yet. It was titled: 'From Belonging to Being and Becoming: How Urban Planning Can Bridge the Gap Between Immigration and a Just Transition, Once Recipe at a Time.'
The project was born from a question that was both personal and political: as climate change accelerates and displacement increases, how do we make sure that people who are forced to migrate do not lose themselves in the process? How do we design cities and public spaces that allow people to remember who they are?
At the time, Rozette was also processing personal grief, a loss that made her question her own reasons for continuing. The thesis became a way of mapping how she could keep going in life by designing a world that made it worth continuing.
The Problem with Assimilation
Rozette draws a sharp distinction between assimilation and adaptation. Assimilation, as she has experienced and observed it, means stripping yourself of what raised you. It means abandoning language, food, ritual, and memory to fit into a new home.
Adaptation, by contrast, can be human. It can preserve what people carry with them while allowing them to take root somewhere new. This, she argues, is what good urban design can do when it is built with intentionality and justice in mind.
Community Gardens as Anchors of Culture
Her research brought her to examples from cities like Seattle and Detroit, where social justice activists used community gardens during economic downturns as both food sources and relationship-building spaces.
One example she returns to often is the Danny Woo Community Garden in Seattle's International/Chinatown district, a 1.5-acre space conceived by Filipino-American community activist Bob Santos, known as 'Uncle Bob,' for seniors in the surrounding neighbourhood of predominantly Southeast Asian refugees.
The garden became exactly what Santos envisioned: a place where elders could grow the produce they had grown up eating in their home countries, share it with others, and build relationships across generations. Cooking classes, kids' gardening programs, and community celebrations now happen in that same space. Food became the thread that tied cultures together while honouring each one's distinctiveness.
In this work, Rozette saw evidence for something she now believes deeply: a public space, when thoughtfully designed, can organically move people toward understanding each other. And through that organic interaction, a person's sense of self becomes sustained, allowing diversity to thrive rather than be feared.
Cities, Immigrants, and the Urban Farm Model
In her own neighbourhood in New York, Rozette points to an urban farm offering community-supported agriculture programs that provide affordable fresh produce on a sliding scale. In 2022, the farm partnered with NYU Langone to supply culturally specific produce to the immigrant communities of Sunset Park, addressing both nutritional needs and the deeper need for cultural continuity.
This is the kind of solution Rozette wants to see more of: intentional, specific, designed by people who understand the communities they are serving. Not apps that assume universal smartphone access. Not programs that treat immigrants as a monolith. But spaces and systems that ask: what does this specific community actually need, and how do we design for that?
THE VISION
Radical Imagination and the Long Work
A Principle That Guides Everything
During an Environmental Justice Leadership fellowship called RAY, Rozette encountered a statement that fundamentally reshaped how she understood her place in the world: 'We are only as alive as the rest of the planet is alive.'
The statement captured for her the deep interconnection between her own life and everything around her, the trees, the water, the air, every living creature. Radical love and care are what sustain that dynamic. From this, she developed her own guiding principle: 'There is no hurt that cannot be repaired by love.'
This is the lens through which she now approaches every community project, every workshop, every relationship she builds. Radical imagination, for Rozette, is not escapism. It is a rigorous mental practice of getting clear on what legacy you want to leave behind.
Intergenerational Learning as Revolutionary Practice
Rozette draws deep inspiration from Grace Lee Boggs, a longtime elder and social justice mentor who spent her life arguing that intergenerational relationships are essential for revolutionary change. The mutual exchange of ideas between older and younger generations keeps hope alive, and hope, Rozette believes, is what allows us to envision a new reality grounded in love and care.
This shapes how she designs all of her programs. She actively creates spaces where elders and young people encounter each other, not because it is a nice gesture, but because she believes the wisdom of those who have lived longer and the passion of those who are still building are both necessary. You cannot forge a better future without understanding how you arrived at the present.
"There is so much wisdom to be learned from our elders in the life journey they've already experienced, and merging that with the passion for change and trying new approaches that the youth have is powerful."
Consistency as the Core of Long-Term Impact
When people ask Rozette how she sustains her relationships and her community over time, her answer is simple: she shows up as herself, every single time. No curated professional version. No code-switching. Just Rozette, honest about her intentions and her purpose, trusting that the words she speaks will find the people who resonate with them.
For a long time, she wore her ability to code-switch as a badge of honour, learning to perform a version of herself that fit into the professional social impact world. But over time, she started to not like who she was becoming. She felt shame for where she had come from. The spaces meant to create change were not making her feel safe enough to be fully herself in them.
Now, the consistency between who she is privately and who she is publicly is the whole point. That alignment between values and actions is what allows trust to accumulate over time, in herself, and in the communities she builds.
THE ADVICE
What Rozette Would Tell You
In the depths of her own grief and jadedness, Rozette's mentor offered her guidance she did not fully understand at the time: 'As long as you are aligning your life actions with your values, and grounding that in your truths, then you are on the right path.'
It took her three years of reflection to understand what that really meant. When you stop running from yourself and begin to understand who you are, what you believe in, what you care about, what you cannot compromise, those values become a north star. Decisions get easier. The right projects, opportunities, and relationships begin to find you. Everything feels more fulfilling because it is consistent with who you actually are.
And when chaos comes, because it always does, that grounding is what keeps you from being swept away. You know where you stand. You know why you are doing what you are doing. No external noise can uproot you because your roots go all the way down.
"As long as you are living your life, making choices and actions that are aligned with your values, and you are grounding that with your truths, then you are on the right path."
For Rozette, this is not just personal advice. It is the foundation of everything she builds. Because a community led by people who know who they are, people grounded in love, truth, and their own story, is the most powerful kind of community there is.