I was raised by an activist mother who taught me it was both necessary and possible to create change in our communities. Her kitchen table activism was my first education in solidarity, social justice, and the transformative power of bearing witness to each other’s stories. I’ve kept learning ever since.
My body of work pivots around the questions “How do we create change?” and “How do we care for each other?” I’m more interested in the process of inquiry than I am in clinging to the hope of finding conclusive answers. Asking these questions has the potential to transform how we think about change as well as the relationships, communities, organizations, and systems we build.
How do we care for each other?
My professional path began with graduate training in health research, where I learned to critically analyze health systems and interrogate their underlying assumptions and power dynamics. My master’s and doctoral research focused on care work as I sought to make sense of health policies that seemed antithetical to care.
I understand better now that these policies and systems aren’t broken, they’re working as designed, often with devastating consequences for patients, workers, and caregivers.
Education in the classroom and in the wild
While I’ve done lots of formal education, my most formative lessons about health systems, care practices, and healing have come from my lived experiences as a queer person and through learning from other queer and trans people. I became an LGBTQ+ health advocate out of a desire to help health care providers get better at caring for my community and because I want queer and trans people to live long, full, joyful lives. Fifteen years (and counting) of doing this work across North America has affirmed my conviction that systemic transformation is desperately needed and that queer and trans people should be the architects of our own care.
Writer, editor, and thinker
My work as a writer draws on the lessons I learned early in life about the power of sharing and bearing witness to each other’s stories. My anthologies The Care We Dream Of (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2021) and The Remedy (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016) reckon with the harms of health systems that are inequitable by design. They explore the possibilities that emerge when we feel equipped to imagine, think, and act beyond the constraints of these systems. My experience as a writer and LGBTQ+ health advocate has shown me how we can use stories to change systems and generate living archives of the care practices that help our communities survive and flourish.
How do we create change?
creating change in large, Complex Systems
I’m deeply curious about what it takes to create and sustain change at scale while working in complex systems. My professional experience in leadership roles at several national and provincial health research organizations was a formative practice ground for doing this kind of large-scale change work. There, I led the development and implementation of strategic plans and other organizational strategies, worked with evaluation practitioners to evaluate those strategies, and built organizational capacity for thinking and acting strategically while navigating ever-shifting internal and external landscapes. I oversaw complex, multi-year organizational change initiatives, designed multimillion dollar funding programs, and was a strategic partner, coach, and advisor to CEOs and executive leaders. It’s here where I honed my skills as a leader, facilitator, and strategist.
LGBTQ+ Death, Grief, and end of life care
My practice includes a growing focus on death and grief work, a path I pursued after caring for my mother at the end of her life. I trained as an end-of-life doula in 2022 and became a hospice volunteer in 2023. I’m deeply committed to equitable and inclusive end-of-life care and have used my platform as a writer and LGBTQ+ health advocate to create spaces for learning, reflection, and dialogue on topics like queering death and LGBTQ+-inclusive hospice care.
My work as a consultant is informed by my expertise in grief and death.
I help people and organizations prepare for and move through the endings and grief that accompany change with more ease, skill, and awareness.
Social justice that prioritizes sustainability
As a queer person who’s been part of movements for social justice since I was a teenager, I’m passionate about creating changes that are more liberatory and just. I’m dedicated to doing this work in ways that prioritize our relationships, well-being, and the long-term sustainability of our movements.
Now in my mid-forties and the parent to three young children, I want to be part of nurturing interdependent, intergenerational communities grounded in care, solidarity, and mutual aid.
I’m grateful to live with my children and co-parents on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territories of the Quw’utsun peoples. As a person of Scottish and Irish ancestry, I’m continually learning and practicing what it means to be a respectful guest on lands that don’t belong to me. My pronouns are she/her.
Learning and Professional Experiences that Inform My Practice
My body of work is grounded in, and informed by, a range of learning, professional, and community experiences. Some of the ones that feel most formative to me are:
Leading in, and learning to understand, complex systems
I’ve held leadership roles at several national and provincial health research organizations:
Executive Lead, Organizational Integration and Transformation, Michael Smith Health Research BC (2021-2023)
Director, Strategy, Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research (2016-2021)
Assistant Director, Institute of Gender and Health, Canadian Institutes of Health Research (2008-2015)
I apply my learnings from professional development courses on topics like adaptive leadership, working in complexity, human systems dynamics, appreciative inquiry, and social innovation.
I also draw on my training in qualitative health research methods. My background includes a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of British Columbia and a Master of Arts in Communication from Simon Fraser University.
Designing and hosting conversations that matter
I attended my first facilitation course in 2009 after working on a collaborative project with an experienced facilitator opened my eyes to what a skilled facilitator can do. That course soon led to another, and I’ve been developing my facilitation skills and practice ever since.
My facilitation training includes the Art of Hosting and Liberating Structures, as well as a range of other participatory methodologies that I use in person and online. I’ve facilitated everything from an 80-person team-building retreat to provincial consultations on health research priorities to strategic visioning sessions for nonprofits.
What threads my facilitation practice together is a commitment to convening spaces that enable inclusive dialogue and invite us to be with each other in the questions as we arrive at the answers.
Community-engaged creative work that centres justice, healing, and trauma-informed practice
My expertise and practice are deeply rooted in, and informed by, the communities I’m part of. I came of age in a community of queer artists, writers, and activists united by a punk-inspired do-it-yourself ethos.
This spirit continues to inspire my work, as does everything I’ve learned from these communities about justice, healing, collective care, somatics, and trauma-informed practice.