Asia was raised by a collective of radical aunties, uncles and her grandmother Betty Jo in the Historic Five Points community, the ancestral home of the Ute, Cheyenne and Arapahoe peoples. Infused with the Jazz of the “Harlem of the West,” Asia has developed new frontiers of healing and earth based relationship not through the erasure of the past and its peoples, but the melodious recombination, reintegration and regeneration of ancestral wisdoms.
I died for the cause. Decades of activism for the earth and her peoples left me burnt out and broken. Ta-Nahisi Coates in the banned text Between the World and Me had me understand the American tradition of destroying the black body and I made it my responsibility to protect my body, by any means necessary. In my post-Activisms, I resurrected myself though remineralization, living foods, and local weeds. I scaled my own healing to have greater impact though various social movements, businesses and organizations. I bring the healing to you though, my writing and liberated earth-based educational experiences.
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Asia Dorsey is an organizational consultant, educator and bioregional herbalist in Denver, Colorado. She attended New York University where she studied sociology, the environment and food as an undergraduate. In order to understand how to institutionalize social and ecological justice at the level of organization, she continued her education with graduate studies at the Wagner School of Public Service in 2014, where she centered nonprofit management.
To deepen her awareness of social and ecological design, Asia completed her permaculture teacher certification and apprenticeship at The Permaculture Research Institute of Australia. With her ecological design practice in hand she developed regenerative fertilization systems while studying indigenous seed saving and Indian culinary genius at Navdanya International in Uttarakhand, India.
In Accra, Ghana, Asia studied global nutrition, traditional cuisine and food systems helping her discern global patterns of wellness and the specific adaptations of her West African peoples. She learned the deepest parts of her practice, apprenticing and exploring the science of traditional food and nutrient-dense regenerative agriculture with her beloved mentor Kay Baxter at the Koanga Institute in New Zealand.
After applying ecological design and her hard won ancestral knowledge to her own body to heal her years of depression though the power of bones and bugs (probiotics foods), Asia inherited the Five Points Fermentation Company from Milian Doshi in 2016. She created a model of regenerative, cooperatively organized business to heal the dysbiosis of society and the microbiomes of her people. She incorporated plant medicines or botany, after her first hand experience of using well prepared plants to resolve the various mental afflictions and burn out that came from running a business. The herbs worked and she wanted to spread their gospel. She uplifted lead organizer Sheree Brown in the establishing the Ancestral Herbalism Healing Collective bringing in diverse speakers and teachers from around Colorado leading with the notion that everything we need is already here. This introduction led to years of mentorship with renowned herbalist Susun Weed accumulating in an apprenticeship in 2021, the same year she and her best friend co-founded the Petty Herbalist Podcast. In 2022, Asia with a group of radical herbalists, witches and midwives organized Project Iroko a reproductive justice and herbal healing mutual aid society.
Asia deepened her health work completing her yoga teacher training in 2015. In 2019, with her belief in the ability of workers cooperatives to heal our economic system, Asia co-founded the Satya Yoga Cooperative for People of Color. In 2021, Asia became a certified Yoga Nidra instructor with Kamini Desai of the Amrit Yoga Institute. She and Satya founder, Lakshmi Nair have since trained multiple cohorts of yoga students in this ancestral meditation practice with a framework of Rest as Reparations.
Asia’s work as an organizer began as a young person coordinating other young people and facilitating trainings locally and nationally around issues of youth voice and environmental justice with an organization called Earth Force. In university she became a Kingian Nonviolence facilitator and trainer though the Center for Nonviolence & Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island. She coordinated movement work around prison abolition, economic justice and food justice.
Asia was the Healing Justice Coordinator for the Fellowship of Reconciliation Reparations Campaign helping faith based organizations remember their past, imagine new futures, strategize and implements efforts to heal the damage caused by racism. As a reparationist, Asia has developed reparations curriculum for www.reparations4slavery.com where she is the host of the Healing Black Futures Podcast.
She has given lectures and facilitated trainings and workshops at institutions such as Regis University, Denver University, University of Colorado at Boulder, The Denver Botanic Gardens, University of New Hampshire. She is a presenter, organizer and facilitator of quirky and dope afrofuturist events like TimeCamp and the upcoming Pan African Arts Festival as a founding member of the Palm Wine Collective. Recently,Asia has served on the board of Earth Force, Greenleaf Denver, Center for Community Wealth Building and the Denver Sustainable Food Policy Council.
Currently, Asia co-facilitates the Permaculture Design Course with the Regenerative Education Collective. She teaches and embodies social-ecological design as an educator and organizational consultant with Regenerate Change. Asia weaves her various experiences into fun, practical toolkits, workshops and events that transform our relationship to our planet, our bodies and each other.
