Lived Experience Interview:
Tony Passino — Youth & Climate Advocate, Doctoral Student, Community Activist

In this interview, conducted at the 2025 URBAN National Conference, Tony Passino reflects on the impact of youth voices on social justice, his current PhD program at UMass Boston that focuses on community-based action research, and the importance of curiosity, and relationship-building in the context-specific endeavor of collaboration.

JCEC:
Can you tell me a bit about yourself, the work that you do, and how you ended up being connected to the URBAN Research Network?

Tony:
My name is Tony Passino and I’m originally from Indiana. I started getting involved in community-related work in undergrad, I was really involved on campus with different student clubs, and that led to some different opportunities. I ended up moving to Washington, DC to work in public health for a tobacco prevention campaign called Truth Initiative, the one with all of the “truth” ads on TV, and I worked with them in their Community and Youth Engagement Department. I helped run a leadership development program that was active at college campuses across the country. The goal was to try to pass policy on college campuses around tobacco and vaping to promote tobacco free campuses. And in that work, I really saw the impact that the youth voice can have on changing things within the world. That experience was one of the first for really engaging in topics around social justice and how tobacco disproportionately impacts different communities, and it sort of helped to continually fuel the fire in my own heart around being involved in the community.

I did that work for about four years at the local, state and federal level, and I kept thinking to myself, ” You know, what does impact mean?” And that’s a big question that I’ve asked myself for a really long time. And, for me at least, I think it’s something that I’m continually uncovering — getting closer to it, you know — and it’s that process I think that matters. I don’t think I’m ever going to have a full, complete definition of impact, because its forever out of reach. I’m okay with that, because it’s part of my own process of learning and growing and being a better ally. I am constantly asking myself, “What is my role?” I was asking a lot of these kinds of questions before I started the PhD program that I’m in now.

I’m at UMass Boston in their Organizations and Social Change Program. It’s within the College of Management and it is a good program. I The coursework at UMass Boston has exposed me to different opportunities to be involved in places like this [URBAN]. And so, to answer your question of what brings me here is that I’m taking a community-based action research class with Professor Mark Warren right now in the Public Policy Department. It’s a little bit different than the College of Management, but in that class, we do a community-engaged research project. And the class…it feels so much like the work that I was doing when I was in public health that was really rooted in the community. It feels like some of the classes could be a student organization meeting where we are trying to figure out a problem and trying to figure out how to address it, right? I didn’t think academia could be like that. I didn’t think that that was possible. It’s really beautiful. I’m so lucky and grateful to be able to be in a place where I can see other academics doing it differently, other academics who aren’t just trying to play the publishing game to get tenure, who changed that definition of impact factor in journals towards impact in society, right? Actually changing live circumstances for people, because the world’s full of a lot of big, massive problems, and there’s a lot of research that doesn’t contribute to or inform that at all. I don’t want to play a part in that, you know. So, I guess that’s what brought me here.

JCEC:
How do you tend to think about collaboration and what kinds of collaborative relationships or practices are you or your organization engaged in?

Tony:
I feel like that was one of the big questions that really drove me to get involved with organizations and social change, the question: If we can all collaborate more, how can we be better set up to understand and address big problems, right? I think we can recognize that collaboration is really important for addressing some of these challenges that we see in the world. The actual practice of doing it is really difficult. It’s different to talk about it versus actually practice it.

Currently, my community-based work is with a student group called Change the Chamber, and it’s a coalition of over 100 student groups from across the country who advocate for change within the Chambers of Commerce as well as well as the Chambers of Congress. We meet with legislators. We meet with Fortune 500 companies and talk about their sustainability policies and different things like that. A lot of folks are on climate and we talk about collaboration a lot. We talk about building relationships with different groups. How can we not reinvent the wheel every time? How can we rely on and support the work of other people? I think that the question, again, “What is our role in a collaboration?” is really important to me. What is my role in a collaboration? And honestly, the thing that has helped me most, or that I found the most power in, is relationship building. It’s having a conversation with someone. It’s getting to know people. It’s taking the time to really build and maintain that relationship. And at least within my organizing, it’s trying to move beyond it just being a transactional thing, and actually developing friendships with people.

Some of the people that I work with in the community group I invited to my wedding because our relationships have grown and some of us have never met in person before, right? We’re just online. Collaboration is recognizing that we can talk about it, but the actual practice of it can take time. I think with that, collaboration requires just being kind of yourself, letting things grow and not forcing things and continually asking, “What am I bringing to this relationship?” It’s different in different places, different contexts, working with different people. I think it’s about a lot of the same skills that I learned on the playground: how to make friends, build relationships, and really be, you know, a good friend.

JCEC:
Based on your experience, what would you say are some collaboration-best-practices that you would suggest others use in their collaborative relationships — particularly in this current context of great social upheaval and uncertainty?

Tony:
I think curiosity is a big one for me…asking people questions, being thoughtful, asking people questions that you’re genuinely interested in and taking an interest, getting to know other people, and trying not to see people as just like a transaction. Or it’s a step to further the work, but it’s a relationship, and it’s something that I still work on, too, because sometimes it can be a bit transactional when we’re all trying to work together to affect a bigger change. You think about, “How can this group or organization help push out my materials to a wider audience?” You know? And I it’s a recognition that collaboration and the practice of it is full of mistakes, so to be kind on yourself. I don’t know. I mean, the curiosity thing, I see this as a big one in any kind of collaboration, just asking people, “What does collaboration look like for you? How is this helpful?” One thing, at least in my work, is sometimes it can feel a little bit rushed, like we jump into a collaboration with a different group, and maybe it’s transactional first and we don’t really take the time to build the relationship, right? So, it’s not resilient. It’s more fragile, as opposed to some of the groups we’ve worked with.

We work with this one group called Elders Climate Action, and that’s been a really great collaboration between our group of student groups and this group of elders from across the country who are taking action on climate change. We planned an intergenerational climate action month as a collaboration between the two different groups. Because we’ve taken so much time to build relationships with them over the past two years, it really means they are a great collaborator and like a good friend to our organization. They keep us in mind when they see grant opportunities. We keep them in mind when we see grant opportunities. If we have an event, we might invite one of them to be a speaker and vice versa. It’s a good collaboration because it feels like there’s a strong relationship there, and because there’s a strong relationship there it’s like it’s a metaphor of a friend, right? You care about your friends, so when you see an opportunity you tap your friend and say, “Hey, this thing’s happening!” It’s like, we’re constantly in each other’s minds in the way we’re thinking about each other, you know? And that’s support. How can we support each other? That is a big question in collaboration.

JCEC:
Is there anything you would like to add?

Tony:
I’d be curious to hear what other people say about collaboration because an individual perspective on collaboration is one thing, but then seeing other people’s perspectives, you know, when collaboration is inherently a relational thing would be interesting, you know, for figuring out what works best for a specific group. Collaboration entails two or more people working together to try to do something right. So, depending on what that makeup is of the group, or how big the group is, or organizational level is, it’s a relationship. It’s relational. It’s working with each other to ask, “What do we mean together? How can we support each other? How can we show up for each other?”