Resourcing Change
Change is happening. let’s GET ready & resourced to meet it together. 
A policy poet, a dreamer who loves to get down and dirty with the details, a community organizer who is learning to slow down while staying engaged, a formally-educated person who embraces many kinds of knowing beyond the rational, and a broken-hearted activist who believes in our humanity against all the odds — I bring what I know to meet what you know. I step into my role as guide, facilitator, and consultant, with a humble commitment to your own particular complexity and mystery.
Together, we are going to do the thing. It will be a potent mix of effective and exciting, and maybe even transformational.
Walking backwards from the thing that needs to get done (grant-writing, policy proposals, risk assessments, budgets, marketing, social media campaigns, staff transitions), we co-design a process that is unique for each context and community. The process draws on a mix of community-based research tools, consensus-building dynamics, grief groups, ancestor consultation, and ritual practice. The weaving of spiritual practice with practical goals is intentional and the individual and shared stories that surface throughout the process are the sign-posts for charting a new path. It is a process I like to call “story-walking” because the stories we share with one another are like the stones we lay to walk on, we create the ground as we go.
This is community engagement - writ large and going deep. We will not end up the same place we start. And we will have fun along the way.
Facilitated story-telling where participants share what they know (and don’t know) about their lineages. We talk about the relationships and rituals available to support ancestral connection with respect for different religious belief systems about an afterlife. We explore intergenerational experiences of harm and healing, with attention to the ways that supremacies of all kinds—human, race-based, gender, economic—are part of our lineages. This is an invitation to new or deepening ancestral awareness, as a big part of being alive.
Touching our grief guides us towards our purpose and (re)connects us to each other. In order to enter the experience of grief together in this time, we also need to be aware of inter-cultural differences, our social location in relation to privilege/power, and trauma-informed boundaries. If you would like to lean into the human birthright to feel and express our range of emotions together, consider scheduling one or more grief groups with me. I facilitate dynamic, participatory rituals that support the group to safely express their grief around a particular question, topic, process, or event.
what is & what can be
Holding space for…
My Story
For as long as I can remember, I have loved stories.
Especially the big ones, the mythic-size legends that connect people to one another. My childhood unfolded within the peculiar stories of my Mormon family and community in Utah and then Texas. We made sense of our world and our place in it with our own language that felt like a warm hug: the sacred grove, choose the right, no caffeine (expect for diet coke), and sunbeams. If you know, you know. As I matured into young adulthood, the stories of my Mormon upbringing began to feel painful too. Too much of life experience was left out of the story, not legible, not okay. Why?
So, in response to exclusion, I sought out the edges of story.
I got a PhD in literature with a focus on transnational literature (aka all the ways that literature interrupts and complicates our nation-based identities, stories, and borders), and I travelled to Chile, Peru, Bolivia, and Mexico while learning Spanish in its many tones across the Americas. Traveling confirmed my sense that my people’s stories were too small for the great expanse of living, loving creation – the horrifying injustice and the extraordinary beauty of it. As a white-bodied woman with economic, social, and cultural resources, I turned towards a path of justice and spiritual activism. I began to live on the edges of stories, in the borders, the broken places, the transitions, the wounds…where new stories take shape.
Leaving in order to love.
From settler-colonial people, I grew up in a suburban bubble of comfort called Spring, Texas within the United States bubble of comfort called neoliberal capitalism. When I moved to Mexico City in 2006, I found spaciousness and freedom, bright colors and delicious food, warm relations and kind strangers. I am soul-deep grateful for the many ways the people and the streets of this country have welcomed me as family. At the same time, my move placed me in friendship with many who made the same move from the United States to Mexico, back to their homelands under the long shadows of forced migration, deportation, and violence.
“De aquí y de allá.” From here and there.
From 2012 until 2021, I stepped into leadership beside compañeres on the frontlines of racism, extractive capitalism, and patriarchy. We crafted community inside a new story that arose in the border wounds.
We insisted on the multiplicity and the complexity of stories between our two countries in the independently-published book, Lxs Otrxs Dreamers.
We “story-walked” ourselves towards an organized community called ODA. Imperfectly, but intentionally carving out a little pocket of meaning-full-ness where the stigma of having multiple national identities could be named, looked at, and ultimately integrated as a strength, a blessing, a table to meet around.
To this day, even now, telling and re-telling the story of “de aquí y de allá” feels like another kind of warm hug – an irrational knowing that we could walk through that “story-door” into a Dignified Return to Mexico City or into another kind of future for our children and grandchildren where they can Florecer Aquí y Allá.
Families continue to be cruelly separated inside the deadly stories of who can belong in a place and who cannot. You can support the organized communities responding to those in the aftermath of deportation and threat of deportation here, and here, and here.
Story-walking towards liveable futures
Since 2021, I have continued to listen with communities as they articulate new shared stories for well-being and dignity.
Sometimes that has taken the form of a cultural event like the Somos Mayfair 25th Anniversary Gala + Zine.
Other times, the story for a liveable future has taken shape as a policy report on Race and Health Disparities in Santa Clara County,
Or a funding process like the FIRST 5 Santa Clara County Stronger Systems, Stronger Families Initiative.
In several of these projects, the work of story to world the world was more implicit than explicit, even as it was the beating heart of the work. It was the way we listened to one another, sensed into the meaningfulness of the moment, and then weaved together a compelling invitation to others. And now, in these challenging times, I want to invite us “to story-walk” with more intention, attention, and (re)connection.
I am offering these services because I believe that past and future generations, as well as our more than human kin, are also ready to walk with us. This is the next as yet un-written chapter in my own story-walk, and I am thrilled to be walking it with yous….
Lineages
Training
I bring academic and experiential training to the community engagement, qualitative research, workshops, and ritual spaces.
PhD in English Language & Literature from the University of Texas in Austin with a focus on Transnational & Border Studies (2004-2010). My academic training informs the depth, curiosity, and respect that I bring to a multiplicity of perspectives—perspectives that have historically been experienced as relationship and as rupture.
Engaged with many others in the slow building over time of an embodied anti-racist culture, including through courses like “How to Hold Whiteness Responsibly” (2020) with Laura Brewer, “Foundations in Somatic Abolitionism” (2022) with Education for Racial Equity, and 1:1 coaching with Michelle Puckett (March 2023 - Feb 2024).
Ancestral Healing Code, a five-month course with Thomas Hübl (Nov 2024 - March 2025). Currently in phase one of the Resilience Program training pathway for "Trauma-Informed Leadership for Societal Resilience” (2026) with The Pocket Project.
An international facilitator with the Spiral Journey in the decolonizing expanded spiral of the Work That Reconnects (Oct 2025- April 2026).
Active participant learner in various online communities including Ancestral Medicine, The Work That Reconnects Network, Plum Village, and The Pocket Project, among others.
Traditions
Talking about ritual, grief, and ancestors can seem “out there” to a lot of people: irrelevant, not serious, something that “other people” do. That is part of the Big Lie: that we are fundamentally separate from each other and our other than human kin. This is especially true for those of us who grew up in dominant white culture and US American norms. So, what traditions would I, a white-bodied woman with US American education, be able to draw on to do this work? How can I do this work in ways that honor indigenous traditions that have preserved their rituals despite extraordinary violence and oppression without appropriating them? When I facilitate grief groups, ancestral connection, and ritual space, I am relying on the healthiest parts of my Mormon and Quaker experience of communal spiritual connection, my relationships with my ancestors and the lands where I live, and “technologies” of intuition (somatic listening, writing, conversation, prayer, silence, song, movement, witnessing) that are under-appreciated but innate to each of us. I do so with humility, respect, and awareness of the ways native cultures carefully share and protect their own traditions for the highest good of all beings.
Ancestors
I come from the Celtic peoples of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales, the Frisian peoples of the Netherlands, the ancient cultures of Denmark, Germany, and Great Britain. From the religious migration of my great grandparents to the Americas. When I show up, I show up with my people. We acknowledge the harm we have done, we are doing. We realize there is still a chasm of cruelty we have not yet been able to cross between awareness and repair. We are learning to be in regular-sized relationships with all life, in awe of the intricate beauty of this planet, and grateful to be alive.
Let’s work together!
