As a high school student in the early 90s, I became an HIV/AIDS peer educator to combat harmful misinformation we were receiving from parents, schools, the media, and the government. That experience led me to the social work profession, where I have contributed to change efforts in youth programs, community development, education, mental health, anti-gentrification, and more.

I am now the director of a network focused on environmental justice and creating a society that values healthy communities above profit. I also strive to cultivate connections and curiosity as a Warm Data host with the International Bateson Institute. I grew up in a working-class household in Iowa with Western European settler ancestry. I am a cisgender white woman living near Pittsburgh – home to many Indigenous peoples, including the Monongahela culture – where I learn, hike, parent, practice letting go, notice what emerges, write, befriend trees, and strive to heal racialized trauma in myself, my family, and my community.

I’m a workshop facilitator and the Communications Lead for We Are Finding Freedom. For me, racial justice work is about showing up for the people I love while I answer a deeper call to reckon with white feminism. My life experiences in Pennsylvania & the Rust Belt, the upper Midwest and the Bible Belt Mid-South, have all shaped my perspective. After several years in academia, I was fired for supporting a student mural of Assata Shakur and have spent time since 2015 as an AmeriCorps volunteer, a social worker, a home improvement store worker, an organizational consultant, and an outreach manager.

I’ve made big mistakes, formed deep relationships and had big lessons everywhere I’ve been and I bring that curiosity and experimental energy to my facilitation. I also bring deep listening, love of context and history, body awareness, music and humor to this work. I’m middle-aged and queer, with Western European settler ancestry and middle/ruling class family history. I live in Minneapolis on Dakota and Ojibwe land, where I enjoy domestic crafts like knitting & sewing, outdoor activities, studying astrology & tarot, and spoiling my five nephews near and far.

I am a white, Queer Jew, raised upper class in the suburbs of PA, NJ and FL. As a relationship-builder, healer, spouse, and mama, I now call Georgia home.

I am grateful to the many communities who organized me into movement and called me in to work with my people. These include the People’s Institute for Survival and Beyond, the Atlanta Anti-Racist Organizing Committee, European Dissent, Southerners on New Ground-Atlanta, Showing Up for Racial Justice-Baltimore and Atlanta, and so many without formal names.

Trained as a mental health counselor (and working to decolonize that training) I bring an emotion-focused lens to all spaces that I facilitate, with a spirit-deep understanding that we are so much stronger when we are in authentic relationship with one another. I am a lover of all things oceanic and happy to provide dolphin facts at a moment’s notice.

I am a workshop facilitator and Finance Lead with We are Finding Freedom. I am drawn to caregiving and building connections between folks within social change communities. I feel called to do racial justice work focused on education justice, body liberation, abolition, and transformative justice. In addition to We Are Finding Freedom, I’m moving with local education organizers in Atlanta, European Dissent ATL, Atlanta Anti-Racism Organizing Committee, and the Stop Cop City Movement.

I bring facilitation and coaching experience in social emotional development, circle process, team/group dynamics, trauma-informed and collective care with youth workers, educators and racial justice organizers.

Some identities I hold close are being an oldest sister, an educator, a lifelong learner, and a mama. I’m a white, pansexual woman and a recovering restrictive eater who is learning the ways of loving and listening to my body. I love hiking and camping--the kind with a car, big tents, and air mattresses, not the hardcore backpacking kind. I also love to channel my creativity into art, specifically sewing and ceramics.

I’m a white queer Jewish facilitator and rabble-rouser raised in the Midwest and rooted in Philadelphia. I learned how to fight fabulously as an out queer teenager, organizing for LGBTQ youth in my high school and inside the school board. Since then, over the last 20 years, I’ve found home in anti-war movements, transformative justice anti-violence work rooted in community, and prison abolition. I am so pleased to be a worker-owner at AORTA Coop, where I facilitate, coach, and strategize with social justice organizations and community-based projects towards anti-oppression liberation.

I am delighted to spend time with my 2-year-old, where the laughter comes easy and possibility is everywhere. My family is also made up of my amazing partner, handsome dog, and a huge community of beloved friends and comrades.

I was a participant in Finding Freedom in the autumn of 2020 and it unlocked a place of grief, anger, and deepened conviction about the critical work white women and non-binary people have to do as we answer the call of Black and Indigenous and other leaders of color to be a part of taking this thing apart. Let’s go!

I am a white, queer, jewish parent, born and raised in San Francisco, and rooted in Philadelphia for the past 8 years. I come from grandparents who immigrated from Eastern Europe and Russia, fleeing antisemitism. On another side of my family, people participated in early colonization of the northeastern and midwestern areas of Turtle Island.

I am a musician and artist and work in theater and film as a laborer. I am passionate about working with my hands and being away from my computer as much as I am on it. I have been organizing and collaborating for 15 years with Girls Rock Camps and the International Girls Rock Camp Alliance to imagine liberatory futures and fight for social justice through art, music, and collaboration. In 2011, I was a part of a collective that started a youth program called Queer Rock Camp, in Olympia, WA. I have worked and organized with LGBTQ youth and adults towards our collective liberation. I am passionate about intersectional feminism, prison abolition, transformative justice, alternative economies, and working collectively to move resources out of extractive industries and practices and towards BIPoC-led movements.

I attended Finding Freedom as a participant in the fall of 2020 (during the 2020 elections) and was inspired to support this offering of strengthening and steadying communities of white people in the fight against white supremacy.