Culture & Community Building
I am passionate about building teams that foster a sense of belonging and support collaboration, inclusivity, diversity, and respect. These are a few examples of how that passion has shown up in my world.
FLUX FOUNDATION
In 2010, a group of makers, builders, dreamers, and doers did an impossible thing: we built a sculpture the size of several football fields in under 14 days in the Nevada desert. The Temple of FLUX was born of the idea that building art through a radically collaborative process could foster empowerment, education, and a deeply connected community.
Out of this experience at Burning Man 2010, we created the FLUX Foundation, a nonprofit arts organization with a mission to engage people in designing and building large-scale public art as a catalyst for education, collaboration, and empowerment.
With FLUX, I have co-lead teams of volunteers to design, develop, and install over 15 individual interactive sculptures on impossible timelines for public spaces, events, and conferences across the country. This experience has shaped my leadership philosophy — that engaging everyone in the process, empowering people to find their voice, and leading with empathy and inclusivity allows teams to achieve great things together.
Phenomenal - A monthly Company gathering
One of the touchstones of the Practice Fusion culture has always been our monthly company gathering, Phenomenal. It’s an opportunity to connect as a community, celebrate each other, learn about each team’s work, and get a pulse on the company as a whole. Each meeting is centered around a particular theme and is led by a collaborative, cross-functional team. Whether the theme is Black History Month, LGBTQ pride, anti-AAPI hate awareness and activism, or celebrating Diwali, these meetings connect us as a community and cultivate a sense of belonging.
The Design team is at the heart of the meeting, crafting the decks that we use to share information each month and leading the content development process. As a project manager and design manager, I was responsible for building these decks each month. As I moved into a leadership role, I have remained central to the process of designing these meetings as a vehicle to expand our culture of collaboration, support, and innovation.
WOMEN’s Empowerment through Health Justice
My public health career has been focused almost exclusively on community-based public health work grounded in equity and social justice, and the health and well-being of women has always been central to my work. From 2005-2012, I worked with the Women’s Community Clinic on two initiatives that sought to support homeless and marginally housed women through social services and participatory activism training.
“Ladies’ Night,” a weekly harm reduction-based program at the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center in San Francisco open to anyone who identified as a woman held. We offered dinner, safe sex and hygiene supplies, clinical and mental health services, a needle exchange, and fun activities like karaoke and BINGO. In 2008, my colleague, Emalie Huriaux, and I published a paper in the International Journal of Drug Policy about this program: “Ladies' night: evaluating a drop-in programme for homeless and marginally housed women in San Francisco's mission district”.
Women at the Forefront was a partnership between the Women’s Community Clinic and 6 non-profit organizations funded by the Center for Care Innovations. Over the course of nearly 4 years, we developed a core curriculum that aimed to provide hands on training, education, and information to diverse communities of women seeking to create change in their communities.