At 16, I began organizing concerts to raise money for the local food pantry. Much later in 2017, I found myself starting to receive calls from U-C residents who were seeking advice on local community matters because they saw me as a mentor. Throughout, I have sought to share power and engender leadership in those who might otherwise settle for being told what to do, blending the wisdom I’ve gained through mentorship with civil rights leaders with contemporary research on leadership and collaboration, and harnessing industry’s best practices to grassroots purposes.

As regards campus engagement, I have served on numerous GEO committees, acting as department liaison, and providing anti-bias training during staff hiring. I spearheaded graduate involvement in the Chancellor and Provost’s Committee on GLBTQ Concerns, and as the 2018-19 YMCA Bailey Fellow, I brought Dance (for your Life!), the community-wide, all ages queer dance party community I coordinate, onto campus. This project is significant in that it creates safer spaces that are essential to the emotional, psychological, and physical survival of LGBTQIA people, providing communal space to connect, but also contributing to the stress management and trauma processing that are key for marginalized and at-risk communities such as trans youth.

I have also had many professional leadership roles on campus: providing residential housing staff with workshops on active listening, training managers in departments of all kinds on “Supervising 101,” providing youth workshops at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, and being an intergroup dialogue facilitator for OIIR. Informed by that work, in 2013 I founded the local chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice, secured co-sponsorship from the YWCA, and have since supported innumerable campus groups and departments in walking towards a more equitable campus, including supporting staff at the Native American house in drafting a land acknowledgement statement in 2017, and supporting students affecting by immigration policy.

In assembling this essay, I realized there are hundreds of initiatives that I have helped steward, primarily in nonprofit organizations, but also including small businesses, libraries, and campus departments. One of the projects I would like to highlight is organizing and directing the Celebrate Urbana-Champaign People’s History Project: a collaborative, community-based initiative where I collected local stories of “regular people” contributing to a more just community, engaged local graphic designers to create attractive posters, and then placed the posters throughout town including all MTD buses, providing glimpses into local history for students who might not otherwise learn about it. Later I realized this paved the way for similar art projects such as the Art on MTD initiative.

As someone who has been in the U-C community for 18 years, I am pleased to have been able to bridge a gap in collaboration between “town” and “gown” in this and other ways. As a professional facilitator, I have been formally trained in numerous leadership skills and, as a graduate student who studies collaboration, I have contributed to scholarship (e.g. my published article, “Organizing for Organizers”) that makes academic resources legible to non-academics.

I know that addressing the extraordinary challenges we collectively face will likely take collective action at an unprecedented scale. It is always my hope that in providing leadership to others, I can help raise awareness that we are each responsible to our right-sized part the world we live in, and also equipped with agency and wisdom necessary to step into that role.