My 25+ years of advocacy at the local, national, and global levels have inspired me to launch Delta Changemakers, my coaching and consulting practice dedicated to helping leaders, teams, and organizations develop strategies, tell stories, build cultures, and access resources to change the world. My prior academic career, dedicated to analyzing and teaching social and political change, has further fueled my passion for putting research into action.

PRINCIPLES

Every situation requires tools and strategies tailored to the specific context. That said, five core principles shape all my consulting and advocacy:

  • We must understand the past to build a better future

  • Strategies for change from both the grassroots up and from the top down must inform each other

  • Tangible institutional change and intangible cultural change are inextricably linked

  • Internal processes and cultures directly shape external outcomes

  • Developing the right narrative, through the right media, for the right audience must be at the heart of strategy and organizational structure, not an afterthought.

INTERESTS & COMPETENCIES

My core interests include human rights, democracy, and civil society; LGBTQI+ politics and history; protest movements; war, peace, and conflict resolution; refuge, asylum, and migration; health equity; anti-racism; and combating the anti-gender movements & other forms of authoritarianism.

Over the past decade, the heart of my advocacy has been the movement for global LGBTQI+ human rights. Each of these principles have guided my work to ensure the empowerment, security, inclusion, and dignity of all, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, or sex characteristics.

This work includes researching and developing the policy brief providing a plan to end conversion therapy practices around the world for the Council for Global Equality; submitting expert testimonials in support of LGBTQI+ asylum seekers for Amnesty International USA; writing and speaking on LGBTQI+ human rights for both general and specialist audiences; organizing an LGBTQI+ activist speaker series for the Harvard Kennedy School’s Carr Center for Human Rights; and interviewing a broad range of international LGBTQI+ advocates for the Radio Free Qtopia podcast.

ACCOMPLISHMENTS

Sometimes, cultural changes precede institutional and structural change; sometimes, law and policy change quicker than culture. But I’m honored and humbled to have been part of a broad range of advocacy work over the last quarter century (eep!):

  • Raising nearly $50,000 for AccessHealth MA (formerly Community Research Initiative of New England), through the Harbor to the Bay bike rides, for their work to make HIV medications safer, less expensive, and accessible to all who need them;

  • Chairing the Committee on LGBT History, the professional association for LGBTQI+ historians in North America dedicated to promoting both queer scholarship & public history and to combatting homophobic & transphobic discrimination in the historical profession;

  • Running the Raleigh-Durham chapter of GLSEN, advancing its mission to make K-12 schools safe and inclusive of LGBTQI+ students, staff, and families.

  • Founding and directing the Rainbow Triangle Oral History Project that documented the lives of more than 60 LGBTQI+ and allied interviewees in central North Carolina.

  • Helping establish the Duke Center for Sexual & Gender Diversity and the Harvard Office of BGLTQ Student Life.