About
About My Work
The creation of a truly vibrant and sustainable society will take every last one of us. The good news is that the range of identities and perspectives engaging in the collective conversation is expanding exponentially. This is a critical moment. It is rich with possibilities and also leadership challenges.
The participation of so many previously excluded voices is exhilarating, but, for some of us, it can also be disorienting. Particularly for those of us accustomed to having our frame of reference treated as common sense, leading in this moment can feel perilous. Yet, if we hope to embody the societal change we claim to stand for, we’ll need to unlearn older models of leadership while learning to navigate this emerging terrain with creativity and humility. The temptation to step back is understandable. Change is always hard, and especially so when we’re feeling alone and under a spotlight. However, as holders of institutional knowledge that is essential for systemic transformation, we have a vital responsibility to stay engaged.
For over a decade, I’ve been working with activists, artists, educators, and other leaders who want to orient to this emerging landscape - helping them deepen their analysis while strengthening their muscles of accountability and self-compassion. I’ve learned that anyone can build their capacity to engage in this moment with integrity and resilience. I specialize in partnering with other white leaders, especially white men, who want to more effectively and constructively participate in this vital movement for transformation.
About Me
I was raised in a three bedroom ranch house in a leafy suburban neighborhood in northeast Ohio. The street we lived on was safe and quiet; my school was well resourced. Everyone around us was white and no one seemed to notice. I assumed that middle class white Americans like us were the norm, and that people who didn’t have what we had were either unlucky or undeserving.
As a queer kid, I felt obscurely alienated from this tidy world of nuclear families and rigid gender norms, but I didn’t know why. After spending a third of my life trying to fit in - earning Eagle Scout, dating outside my gender, and so on - I relocated to California in search of a more authentic life. Although still deep in the closet, my queerness was like a crack in the foundation of my reality. Eventually, I landed at a small progressive graduate school in the Bay Area, where I finally found support to push my way through that opening and begin to inhabit the wider world beyond.
Besides coming to terms with my queerness, my grad school experience revealed the ideological roots of our ongoing ecological and spiritual crises. I learned to see these crises as products of a Western worldview that centers the human (or man) as the purpose of everything, while relegating the natural world to the status of exploitable resources. This perspective was enormously eye-opening for me. However, it was incomplete.
When , in 2002, my academic program organized a conference on “worldviews,” a group of students from another program called us on our race and class privilege. They pointed out, among other things, that all the presenters were white. I was defensive at first, but they were right. We were advancing revolutionary ideas for solving global crises from an alarmingly limited frame of reference. Prompted by their critique, a few of us began to grapple with how our whiteness contributed to our arrogance and our ignorance. Fortunately, I was able to appreciate the opportunity because I was already in the midst of having my reality and identity transformatively unraveled.
That pivotal event launched me on a sustained examination of the ways my identity as a white man informs and deforms my experience. After grad school. this work formed an invaluable touchstone during my time organizing in the environmental movement and teaching English at San Quentin State Prison. For the last decade, I’ve been facilitating groups of white-identified people to examine their own white socialization. I have offered classes and workshops at various organizations such as the East Bay Meditation Center, Spirit Rock Meditation Center, Park Day School. In 2014, I cofounded Beyond Separation, an educational organization dedicated to helping white people embody their commitment to antiracist practice. Currently, in addition to my private practice, I serve as Lead Teacher for the UNtraining White Liberal Racism program.
It may seem counterintuitive, but through my ongoing engagement with this work, I have learned the true meaning of self acceptance grounded in unconditional worthiness and belonging. It is because I believe that this experience is not only a human right but also an essential prerequisite for a flourishing, ecologically sustainable society, I remain committed to facilitating a collective unlearning of the internalized narratives that uphold unjust hierarchies, undermine human dignity, and preclude true belonging.