Hello! My name is Cazoshay Marie and I am so excited about the Black Vegans Rock movement! As an Alaska-grown wellness professional, my mission is to make holistic health and wellness available to all communities and individuals, especially the black community and others marginalized within our society. I travel all over teaching my customized wellness events and classes to communities, groups and organizations to include Black Lives Matter Portland, Covenant House Alaska and the International Center for Traditional Childbearing’s Black Midwives and Healers Conference.

I am a certified raw vegan chef, sharing delicious and flavorful vegan recipes on my blog, DID with Cazoshay. I want the single mom in the ‘hood supporting her family on minimum wage and the young political science major paying off their tuition to be able to afford and create healthy vegan food for themselves and their families. I keep it very simple and make the instructions doable without fancy or expensive equipment. I post a lot of my tips and recipes with full instructions on Instagram, frequently using hashtags like "#hiphop" and "#melaninpoppin" to have them show up on the timelines of those who may not have otherwise considered healthy vegan eating as the radical and necessary act of preservational self-care that it is. One of my blog posts, entitled #AfroVeganista, specifically addresses attaining holistic health and wellness for ourselves and our communities in a fun and fabulous way.

In addition to being a raw vegan chef, I am also a certified yoga instructor. I teach weekly community hip hop yoga classes in Portland, Oregon. The first fifteen minutes of the classes are for community engagement; I encourage my students to interact and communicate with each other in this time period before we begin the physical portion of the class. We sing, we rap, we heal…but most importantly, we have a good time taking care of our bodies. Yoga, like veganism, can be extremely exclusionary; I am an outside-the-box instructor who teaches it in a way that is fun, relevant and approachable. I offer these classes at a discounted rate to make them more accessible to those who may not be able to afford standard yoga class fees.

I am so encouraged by the creation of Black Vegans Rock, and I look forward to being a part of the growth and sustainability of this movement! Namaste.

Support Cazoshay's Work

Check out her gofundme page and donate anything you can. She is raising mone so that she can take her classes on the road. Funds raised through her campaign will be used for travel and location expenses that come from bringing her class to other states. She also wants to upgrade her equipment so that she can offer better quality videos. Click HERE to donate.