Lineage & Commitments

What’s on this page?

• JOY, as in becoming more capable together
• Lineages of my work
• Ethical commitments
• How I got here
• Thanks for reading! <3

JOY, as in becoming more capable together

I consider myself an artist, whose media are (for example) interpersonal ways of relating, relational infrastructures and procedures. Put simply: the art of bringing people together to do cool things that help us all get free.

I’m interested in dreaming new realities and practicing utopias with others who believe ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE. 

My work right now (2025) is inspired especially by these ideas:

1. THE ONLY LASTING TRUTH IS CHANGE.
2. LIBERATION IS RELATIONAL.
3. LASTNG TRANSFORMATION HAS TO START AT THE ROOT.
4. MUTUAL CARE IS PARAMOUNT TO BUILDING THE FUTURES WE DREAM OF.

My intention: I want to work together with values-aligned folks to build something better for all of us. I am committed to cultivating joy in our movements, by helping folks collaborate with more care and compassion as we move together towards liberation.

Lineages of my work

My work is only possible because of the leagues of activists, community organizers, teachers, somatic practitioners, spiritual leaders, mediators, facilitators, family-builders and others who have come before me. This is why I like to share a resource sheets for every workshop I offer — so that participants have the chance to continue their own daily (un)learning from those who have inspired and taught me.

I would like to express my gratitude to the lands I have lived and traveled, to all those Black, Indigenous and POC women and genderqueer people, survivors of sexual- and gender-based violence, disabled and sick and crazy folks, working and poverty class people, people of non-normative body types or abilities, incarcerated and detained people, “neurodivergent” people, queer and trans folks, sex workers, unhoused folks, people without passports or residents status, and everyone who lives and cares for each other at the margins of our societies, who have shared their wisdom and experiences to shape new worlds — my own worlds included.

My work is created with deepest gratitude to many elders and collaborators, including but certainly not limited to: the members/friends/alumni of Women in Exile e.V., Combahee River Collective, Kes Otter Lieffe, jarral Boyd, Care (Elia Diane Fushi Bekene), bell hooks, DJ Marcelle, Camille Sapara Barton, Bryony Beynon, Staci Haines, adrienne maree brown, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Mariame Kaba, Mia Mingus, Charlene Carruthers, Margaret Killjoy, carla bergman and Nick Montgomery, as well as everyone I’ve met through my work at aequa and in the gorgeous messiness of communal and collective spaces.

Ethical commitments

As a holder of many spaces, I strive to foster braver space that operate with these mindsets.

I can’t promise that I will always get it right, but I can promise to do my very best to keep my ears and heart open, to listen actively to those I hold space for and with, to be accountable when sh*t goes wrong, and to continuously seek for more ways to share the power and privilege I have access to, sustainably and responsibly.

I am guided by my commitment to these ethics and mindsets.

Liberation for all

”No one of us can be free until everybody is free.” - Maya Angelou. I believe in the power of collective action and coalition-building to shifts norms and change worlds, and reject the neoliberal notion that “a rising tide lifts all boats”.

Transformative justice

We are born into oppressive systems that we do not want to recreate through our work for social change, so we use design to reshape our systems to influence behaviors of ourselves, those we work with, and those we stand in solidarity with. We look for systemic and collective solutions for systemic issues, working to see how we can address roots of issues rather than only depend on individual players to be the change they want to see. We cultivate hope through our commitments to each other, by coming back to the table of friendship together, again and again.

Joyful militancy

Joy, as in becoming more capable together. I reject the rigid radicalism that divides our movements, and instead embrace joyful militancy and all the emergence it requires. Joy here is adopted in the Spinozan sense, of becoming ever more capable of feeling and doing something new, together, and militancy as in “a fierce conviction in which struggle and care, fierceness and tenderness, go hand-in-hand” (bergman, Montgomery).

Solidarity not charity

“We are the ones we have been waiting for,” said Alice Walker. When it comes to care — where the state and institutions fail us, we take responsibility for the care of each other. It is collective care rather than self-care through which we will survive the coming times. My work strives to center the needs of those most impacted by systemic oppression and let them lead the spaces they want to hold for themselves. ref: Dead Spade

Emergent strategy

Responsive collective organizing inspired by lessons from nature, I operate on the knowledge that “the only lasting truth is change” (Octavia Butler). I know that contexts and people change constantly, that life is unpredictable and that everything we do teaches us something. Every group is different — and every day we meet, that same group will always be different, because it’s a different day. I work to apply the concepts of emergent strategy in how I move through shared work and spaces. ref: adrienne maree brown

Hospicing Modernity

I will do my best to question the histories and ways of knowing we have been issued by a white supremacist, patriarchal and capitalist society and work together with myself, my clients and my communities of practice in unlearning and dismantling these structures and systems of oppression, domination and extraction, especially striving to stand in solidarity with those who have multiple intersecting marginalizations. ref: Vanessa Machado de Oliveira

Embodied social justice

I acknowledge and try to uplift the many ways of knowing. I strive to address oppressive tendencies and biases stored in our bodies, and dedicate to myself to unlearning systems of oppression that manifest inside of my soma. I acknowledge the role of trauma in our interpersonal relations, including the impact of ancestral traumas, and strive to regularly hold space for co-regulation and healing as we strive to work sustainably and joyfully together.

Multiplicity of experience

We come as whole people into our collaboration spaces. I strive to be power-critical and anti-oppression in all that I do, recognizing that each of us may be affected by our own unique combination of marginalizations and privileges, and how those map to each individual, collective or institution we interact with. Intersectionality means looking for what is invisible and making it known. Intersectionality demands a commitment to social equity, where we respond to folks’ needs rather than giving to all people equally.

Regeneration, degrowth and Just Transition

Racial capitalism and colonialism/imperialism are the source of not only climate catastrophe, but also the unsustainability of much of our movement work. Burnout is not our goal. We want to build sustainable and resilient and regenerative movements! Therefore in our work we will question the capitalist imperatives for more, faster, and bigger, and strive to work in ways that are anticapitalist and decolonial at their core. We strive to build new worlds in which human animals can live in harmony and reciprocity with the other beings and resources we share the planet with.

How I got here

Positionality

My life story has been, like everyone, shaped in many ways by my identities. I am trans/genderqueer, but I was socialized as a white girl/woman until my late-20s, which heavily shaped how I move through the world and led to a lot of patterns I am continuously unlearning. I am housed (renter) with Anmeldung (registration required in Germany), and can pay my bills most months from this work, thought I am currently paying off some debts from a period I was sick in 2024 and couldn’t work. (I am a freelancer = no paid sick leave.) I am pansexual, so-called neurodivergent, currently able-bodied and relatively healthy (though recovery from burnout means I get sick very easily), and hold a US passport and an unlimited German residence visa. I grew up in a big family, single-parent household, below the poverty line in the south of the so-called United States (specifically, the unceded lands of the Wichita people, “North Texas”). I attended university at Boston College, in the northeast of the US, thanks to a financial-needs scholarship and student loans that paid my tuition and board. I also studied a small stint in Bergen, Norway, before eventually making my way to Berlin shortly after graduating college.

I worked at least part-time since I was in my early teens, full time since I was 22, primarily to support myself, as thankfully my parents and siblings were and are currently able to work and support themselves. I do not have access to inherited wealth or savings, and expect to have to support some of my family members in their old age.

My undergrad studies in journalism and internet law somehow led to paid work through the years spanning technology, education, human resources, gastronomy, facilitation and coaching, events management, and maaaaany odd jobs — from hospitality to care work to djing — in between.

Growing up as the oldest of five kids raised mainly by our single mom — a brilliant and generous public-school librarian who was often running group childcare at our home — meant that my role in teaching started from around age 3, and my work in community organizing started around age 8. I have a cat named Penny (the beauty pictured here) and a tendency for making bad jokes while facilitating.

Early Berlin story

I moved to Berlin from Boston at the end of 2009, when I was 23, and got a job working in a small startup, where — after joining as the second employee in 2010 — I worked for 7 years in “marketing and communications”. (I was “visa-married” to the company — my German visa was tied to working there — until 2015.) In startup language, this meant working a wild amount of overtime hours to manage doing every “soft-skill” job that wasn’t valued as highly as the programming, sales or management positions I was often servicing. Internal and external communications (which often entailed ghostwriting emails, articles and conference presentations for execs who got paid 3-4 times as much as me), recruitment and hiring, building a “company culture”, managing learning and development, loading the dishwasher, cleaning up after the company parties. I was still a self-loathing pixie femme back then, and not the best at standing up for myself yet. (It was before I came out as queer and trans/genderqueer, which I did after leaving this company.)

So, you can start to imagine how the sexism in such a place played out — let’s just say, I was “given” a lot of responsibility, was often exploited, and learned a lot from it. I experienced some very dark times emotionally while working there. But I did earn a lot of trust, gain a lot of knowledge and insight, have the stability of a contract and pay grade that eventually led to getting a permanent residence visa, and have the privilege to hire and work with some truly creative, brilliant and incredible people, many of them still dear friends.

We sold the company in 2014, and I went on to project-manage the integration process with the company who bought us while I rode out some important contractual obligations and applied for my permanent residence visa. In 2017, once I secured my (relatively speaking, quite small) payout as a partner of the company, I broke off finally with the money I saved from working there, which I then used to pay off my remaining student loan debts from the university, and founded aequa.

The emergence of aequa

After a year or so of experimentation on the side of that full-time job, in 2017 I received unemployment (or in my case, Gründungszuschuss, unemployment for founders), and I took those 12-ish months to voraciously research a thing I thought Berlin needed. The aequa project was officially cofounded in 2018. With the help and collaboration of many others, I ran a lot of facilitation and event experiments, interviewed dozens of community members about their needs and wants for accessible community/space, and did my best to synthesize those learnings into a game plan, which I would regularly present back to community members and assemblies for feedback. In those early days, we’d host meetups and community assemblies in others’ spaces, like the Workshop on Forster space in Kreuzberg, or this assembly hosted at Raumerweiterungshalle (below), in which we decided to go ahead with looking for our own space.

The lockdown years that followed brought several births into my life:

• I opened the aequa Community Centre (2020-2023), a beautiful and cozy café in Wedding, which (aside from the timing) we were very lucky to get to take over from the owners of be’kech, who were moving on to found Oyoun in Neukölln. Opening this space literally the week before lockdowns started made things, erm, very challenging, to say the least.
• Shortly after moving in, while the space was closed due to lockdown, I was a founding member of Berlin Collective Action e.V. (2020-2024), a queer-and-trans-run mutual aid collective focused on redistributing financial donations from nightlife folks with more secure income out to folks who, for visa or other reasons of marginalization and social exclusion, didn’t have access to state support at that time.
• And shortly after that, trying to come up with new income streams for the café which could no longer run as it had before due to COVID restrictions, I co-founded the aequa Workshops Collective (2020-2025) together with four other facilitators I respected and admired, and we started co-designing and offering online trainings on topics like intersectional inclusion; tending to harm when it happens; self-advocacy and mutual empowerment for marginalized folks; and values-driven collaboration methods for organizations who said they cared.

In 2023, the aequa Community Centre closed and was reborn across the street in our current aequa community space, e13. This is a shared workshop and project space for movement organizers, used by many different member groups and individuals, to organize for issue such as queer and trans liberation and mutual aid, the fight for a free Palestine and other anti-colonial struggles, socialism and social equity, student organizing, housing rights, SW rights and mutual aid, somatic care sessions, grief tending sessions and many more. It also just hosts lots of COVID-safer cute and cozy stuff like Abolition Reading Room, neurodivergent-friendly art-and-craft nights, FLINTA music production classes, gender-neutral German classes, and more.

2025

Today, my weeks are a mix of

• workshop design and facilitation (paid heartwork)
• running aequa’s volunteer-supported e13 community space (unpaid heartwork I wish was paid)
• hosting the monthly aequa Radio show on Refuge Worldwide (unpaid heartwork)
• and working with comrades on initiatives focused mainly on community care, anti-colonial struggles and and border abolition, and mutual aid (unpaid heartwork)

I bring to my work all of these experiences and many more, and I try to show up as my whole self — and I invite you to do the same.

If you made it this far down the page, damn!

Thanks for reading! <3

If you think you might like to work together, head over to my Work With Me page!

I can’t wait to learn more about your story, hopefully soon.