My story

I have spent the last 18 years of my life creating safe places of hospitality for my unhoused neighbors and housed neighbors to encounter one another. I am the Co-founder of the Aurora Commons in Seattle, WA. Prior to that, I Co-founded the Green Bean Coffeehouse (a non-profit cafe). Most recently, I, in partnership with University of Washington/Harborview Hospital, created and launched the Safe, Healthy, Empowered (SHE) Clinic: an accessible, kind, non-judgmental, quality health care clinic for female identified people who sleep and work along Aurora Avenue. All of these movements were created and are currently curated by a community of folks that, together, long to midwife spaces where precious human beings from all walks of life can live as though we belong to one another. I have been living with intention towards my neighbors who are unhoused, drug dependent and involved in survival street based sex work for over 18 years now. I am a member of the City of Seattle Adult Survivor Collaborative (ASC) and the King County End The HIV Epidemic Committee, The King County Just Access to Health Committee for Drug Users and am proponent of harm reduction, and loving absurdly.

Both organizations that I have Co-Founded are beautiful and innovative but most importantly dignifying to the precious humans who inhabit these spaces. I want to use my experiences to come alongside others as a midwife during the process of their own labor of creating models of care in their contexts.

I see myself as a soulful midwife who desires to accompany others (city, corporations, churches, neighbors etc) as they dream and scheme around how to love their most vulnerable precious neighbors. I seek to push people to not just reproduce the models we've inherited that are co-opted by colonialism and capitalism but rather re-imagine a different way: not one of transactional care but one that puts inherent dignity front and center and one that is committed to the prophetic art of accompaniment. I want to steward conversations and help unearth models where precious people risk on behalf of other precious people by being animated not through convention but rather, guided by an unmoving ethic of a covenant of reciprocity.