Jess Rite
Screen Shot 2022-08-29 at 4.13.41 PM.png

Philanthropic Works

Jess Rite is a former board president and interim Executive Director of the Multicultural Resource Center, a flatland-model non-profit community hub in Upstate New York, and a former Art Director at Southside Community Center. After joining Cornell Cooperative Extension's Natural Leaders Initiative, Jess was the youngest Black woman to be granted a Civic Leaders Fellowship by Cornell University. Here are some snapshots and elaborations of some humanitarian efforts Jess has poured herself into.

Remedy House Tucson —Apothecary Director

Jess Rite was introduced to the accessible superpowers of plants at an early age. They spent their early years in Kayenta, Kaibato, and Page, Arizona, where her Granny was a ‘traveling’ teacher —& at one point, the Principal of her school— on the Navajo Nation. Jess witnessed the Diné (Navajo People) utilize plant medicine as a norm for healing anything from allergies, to bee stings, to mental illness.

These practices stayed with Jess as he journeyed into adulthood and parenthood. He was born in Tucson, Arizona; and after studying and teaching herbalism, and working and living on farms in Upstate New York, she felt called to move back home to Arizona.

As the story goes, they were asked to join Remedy House Tucson, a non-profit clinic that provided mutual aid health resources and healing justice to marginalized people in their Hometown.

The Remedy House is no longer operating.

The practitioners & volunteers identified as members of the communities they offered services to. This included multiple intersections of LGBTQIA+, BIPOC, QTBIPOC, immigrants, houseless folks, people who use drugs, sex workers, youth, and folks who wanted &/or needed mental health support.

RG Grad