WRITER + ARTIST + ACTIVIST
ABOUT CRISTIEN
I am a founding member and former Executive Director of Home Alive, a Seattle arts-based anti-violence organization. At Home Alive I worked to develop community based anti-violence, self-defense, and boundary setting curricula and programs that address the broad scope of how oppression, violence, trauma, and abuse inform the structures of our relationships, our organizations, and our movements for collective liberation.
I was a researcher and cultural organizer with The Northwest Coalition for Human Dignity. At NWCHD I researched, monitored, and supported community responses to the white nationalist social movement and developed cultural organizing strategies rooted in arts and music, all of which inform my work as a politicized healer. The social, political, economic, institutional, historical and current systems and institutions we live in matter. Healing happens in relationship, in community, in current social, political and economic systems as well as in our bodies, minds and individual selves.
I am also a co-founder of If You Don’t They Will, a Seattle collaboration that provides concrete and creative anti-fascist tools for countering white nationalism through a cultural lens, including creating spaces to grow visions, hopes, desires, and dreams for the kinds of worlds we actually want to live in.
Project links
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