Hi! Nice to ‘meet’ you. Here’s some about me, and I look forward to getting to know you if you choose to connect…

Growing up as a dual citizen — between Toronto, a rural town outside Buffalo, and Baltimore — and between different socio-economic circles, led me to an early understanding that there are many ways people move through and make sense of the world. I was raised by a single mother who is an educator, artist, and activist, and by a mostly absent father. My known paternal family is small. My maternal family sprawls.

As a young adult the identity that mattered the most to me was being a poet, and I spent nearly a decade living and writing in Canada and the UK. Over the last sixteen years of working predominantly in and with low- and moderate- income, Black, and Brown communities in the United States, I’ve also developed a keen critical analysis of power, privilege, and systems of oppression. This includes learning about and interrogating how these show up in my own intersecting and evolving identities and lived experiences as a White, now upper-middle class, queer, neurodivergent woman who has been the target of gender-based violence, and who has lived with a largely invisible disability and sexuality.

My perspective is deeply informed by my experiences of moving between countries, cultures, and geographies, and the processes of building (and rebuilding) community all that movement steeped me in. It’s shaped by my experiences of racial, economic, and cis privilege, economic precarity, gender-based violence, and trauma, and the fires these lit in me. And it reflects my experiences of the erasures of “passing”, to which I credit my sensitivity for things implicit, unspoken, and unseen.

I think the universe picked this lifetime to teach me about complexity and living beyond binaries. At the moment, I’m doing this learning from Beacon, New York, where I live with my partner and our young kiddo.

Work Experience

Over the past two decades I have collaborated on learning, evaluation, systems change, and anti-oppression work as a teaching artist, facilitator, program manager, C-suite leader, board member, evaluator, consultant, and community member.

Through my work with Create Knowledge, and in prior roles with Algorhythm and Vantage Evaluation, I’ve facilitated local, statewide, regional, and national learning and change work with community and youth organizers, nonprofits, foundations, coalitions, and capacity-builders. These projects have focused on issue areas including: racial justice, the arts, educational equity, social and emotional learning, food justice, people-friendly streets, criminal-legal reform, the relationship between health and housing justice, and peer-led mental health and substance use recovery.

Prior to consulting, I spent nine years working in asset-based youth development and community arts at the nonprofit Free Arts NYC, lastly as Chief Program Officer. There I co-led internal organizational and JEDI-focused change. And I built long-term relationships with young people, families, and staff at schools, community centers, social service agencies, and non-secure detention centers in neighborhoods in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens.

Finally, I started my career at the consultancy General Public Agency in London (UK), which supported public realm strategies in the sectors of culture, heritage, development, community, and urban planning. My facilitation skills were first honed over 6 years of collaborating directly with young people and adults as a poet and teaching artist in the UK and the US (see www.orium.org). And I have a special love for projects that involve big, beautiful, messy, multi-stakeholder collaborations because they keep me connected to these facilitation roots.

In addition to a joint BA in Art History and English Literature (McGill University) and an MPhil in Architecture and the Moving Image (University of Cambridge), I hold graduate certificates in Teaching to Inspire Learning (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Leading Equity and Inclusion in Organizations (Northwestern University). My learning energies are now focused on abolition, queer history and theory, disability history and crip theory, transformative justice, generative conflict, and how to hold space for joy in social justice activism.

Affiliations

Teaching Artists Guild Board of Directors, President (2021 - present)
Emergent Learning Community Project Community of Practice, Member (2021-present)
¡Milwaukee Evaluation! Member (2021-present)
Colorado Evaluation Network Member (2019-present)
American Evaluation Association Member (2018-present)
Teaching Artists Guild National Advisory Committee, Co-Chair (2015-present)
Nonprofit Quarterly Race & Power Advisory Board, Member (2021-2022)
NYC Arts In Education Roundtable Board of Directors, Member (2015-2017)
University Settlement: Cornerstone Campos Plaza Advisory Board, Recording Secretary (2014-2016)

Certifications

Intercultural Development Inventory® Qualified Administrator
Intercultural Conflict Style Inventory® Certified Administrator

Consultant Collaborators

Our passion for collective learning and action means we prefer to partner with other consultants on projects — and we credit so much of our ongoing learning and development to these partnerships. Past and present collaborators include Magenta Freeman, Vidhya Shanker of Collective Knowledge Works and: