What guides my work
Whether I am teaching, leading a workshop, designing with a nonprofit partner, or convening a writing retreat, these principles shape the experience of the work. They reflect what students, collaborators, and community partners can expect: a process grounded in listening, shared authorship, creative practice, and a commitment to community-led change. To read more about the ideas behind this work, visit Community is the Way: Writing and Designing for Transformative Change and Community-Led Design.
Community comes first
A community-first approach centers the visions, strengths, and priorities of the people most connected to the work. It treats community members as knowledge holders, collaborators, and co-authors of the process. This shift shapes how projects are framed, how decisions are made, and how success is understood.
Shared authorship matters
The strongest work grows through collaboration rather than one-way expertise. Shared authorship makes room for many forms of knowledge and invites the people most connected to an issue to help shape the questions, the process, and the outcomes.
Lived experience is expertise
Local knowledge, cultural memory, and embodied experience carry real intellectual weight. This approach honors the insight people hold because they have lived the questions, conditions, and histories the work is trying to understand.
Creative work shapes what becomes possible
I approach writing, storytelling, and design as practices that do real work in the world. They shape how people make meaning, how issues are understood, and how new possibilities can be imagined, made visible, and shared.
Aesthetics Matter
Aesthetics are not separate from meaning. They shape how meaning is made through the senses: through form, feeling, perception, and experience. In this work, attention to the aesthetic is part of how people connect, understand, and feel more fully present to what is being communicated.
Begin with strengths
This work starts from the assets, capacities, and wisdom already present in a community. Rather than defining people by need alone, an asset-based approach looks for what is strong, what is already working, and what can be built on together.
Reflection is part of the work
Good community-engaged work asks for attention, humility, and a willingness to examine assumptions. Reflection is part of how we listen more carefully, recognize power dynamics, and create space for more ethical and responsive forms of collaboration.
Students can do meaningful public work now
Students are capable of contributing to communities in ways that matter in the present. When learning is connected to real relationships, real questions, and real stakes, it becomes more engaged, more rigorous, and more alive.
Process carries values
Justice lives in the structure of the work itself. It shows up in how people are invited in, how decisions are made, whose knowledge counts, and whether the process builds trust, reciprocity, and accountability.
Writing and design can build trust
Writing, storytelling, and design are more than tools for communication. They can help people connect across difference, deepen relationships, and create forms of expression that strengthen community life.