About Facilitating Change

I grew up on the south side of Chicago, and in Brooklyn, child of a gently rebellious Montessori preschool teacher and a community organizer. I absorbed early the values of social justice, discernment, and being in service. The contrast between my “alternative,” mixed-age elementary school classrooms and my giant Brooklyn public high school taught me many of the ways environments can nurture learning and growth, and many ways they can not. I went to Hampshire College in the late 1980s, where I learned that I can learn anything I need to, and to keep following my curiosity. Early on, I worked as a teaching assistant in a Montessori pre-school and then at a daycare center, as an office assistant, an energy auditor, a census worker, an intake worker and receptionist at a fuel assistance program, and a housecleaner. My first resume-relevant job was as the director of the Center for Popular Economics (CPE), a position I held for 7 years, including the two years I was doing my MA in Regional Planning at UMass Amherst. At CPE, I was immersed in what good consensus decision-making could be, in the economics of gender, race and class, and in the power and delight of building containers where people could discover new things together. In the mid-90s, I spent 2 years in Austin, Texas, helping to create a statewide coalition of nonprofits doing community development work, and supporting my then-partner, and my step-daughters, while she went to grad school. We moved the family to Portland, OR in 1998, in part because my parents are here and we wanted to be together as they aged. After landing in Portland, I spent 7 years as the director of the Community Development Network, focusing on building the capacity of Portland-region nonprofits to create affordable housing, and changing public policy to address the critical challenge of building communities where everyone has a home. In that same period, I helped create three groups, eventually serving on the boards of two of them: the Coalition for a Livable Future, becoming a “nationally recognized expert in the connections between smart growth and affordable housing” in the process; Proud Ground (the Portland region’s Community Land Trust); and the Northwest Community Land Trust Coalition. In the mid-2000s, I had a health crisis, quit my job, did some healing, and shifted onto my current work-path as a facilitator, coach, trainer and supporter of organizational change. Since then, I’ve been continually learning how to integrate what I learn coaching individuals and relationships and what I learn working with organizations, strengthening my capacity and skills in both kinds of work. For the last decade, I’ve taught a few classes a year in Portland Community College’s Community Education program, in addition to offering workshops independently and presenting at conferences. My work has been focused, all my life, on creating inclusive processes and communities. My intersectional understanding of dominance culture norms and systems is rooted in the Combahee River Collective Statement, which I read in the mid–1980s and which has shaped my thinking ever since. In the last few years, I have done a deep dive into the construction and characteristics of whiteness and racism, and am committed to my own process of understanding and deconstructing the privileges and toxic norms that are embodied in whiteness, in my own body/experience and in the larger culture, without shaming white people for the role we are caste in by the systems we were born into. I am also clear that this is a lifetime project, that I will make mistakes, and that perfection is not required, but committed work is. Most of my professional work in this arena is about walking with and supporting other white folks in doing the work we need to do to heal and become effective co-conspirators with BIPOC in dismantling racism. I am also committed to addressing all other aspects of dominance culture, and to being an active part of moving us toward an equitable, inclusive and sustainable society where we can all belong. I identify as a cis-gender, queer (bisexual), white, woman. I’ve facilitated writing groups with Write Around Portland, volunteered in my step-daughters’ schools, and spent 10 years co-directing a nine-member fusion folk ensemble called Kendálin with my partner and now sing with a trio called Crow’s Feet. I am an auntie, a grandmother, a caregiver for my disabled partner, a writer, a bird-watcher, and a lover of cats, ivy-pulling and long walks in the woods. You will find more about my training in the last two decades, who I’ve worked with and where else I’ve taught, in other sections of this About page. You can also read testimonials, and listen to several short workshops I’ve taught. If you have other questions about my background or training, please reach out via the Contact form on the bottom of each page.