Personal: My experience of diversity, equity, and inclusion is shaped as a cis-gender white woman, a secondary sexual abuse survivor, and someone with diagnosed depression & anxiety. I grew up poor and in low-income housing in the heart of San Francisco, California. I am a queer ally who has explored my own sexual identity. I am highly educated, having attended a prestigious high school, college, and graduate program. I also grew up in 3 religions with 10 years of Catholic school, 10 years of Jewish summer camp and 6 years of Jewish professional work, and studying Zen Buddhist meditation throughout childhood with my father at the San Francisco Zen Center. I hold many privileges and also have experienced many adversities. Dancing through these spaces and sometimes fumbling through them has been deeply important since childhood, beginning with writing poetry on homelessness, as unhoused persons in SF were always at my eye-level as a child.

Professional: I became acutely aware of my desire to connect on a deep level with all humans in my studies of Social Welfare & Creative Writing at UC Berkeley. Inspired by my mental health work at Glide Church, my undergraduate thesis focused on spirituality as a means to decrease attrition rates for African American mental health patients, and my work in Oakland schools teaching poetry (which won a community service award). My graduate thesis was focused on the portrayal of disability and diagnosis in young adult literature.

As part of my social work field work, I volunteered with Suitcase Clinic, the Women’s Daytime Drop-in Center, Be’chol Lashon (an organization for diverse Jews), Poetry for the People at UC Berkeley, taught in the Oakland school district, and later Glide Foundation/Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. The goal of many of these organizations was and is to foster beloved community, a deep-seeded mission now in my own heart.

At Glide Church, I ran the youth contingent of the MLK speech writing workshop at City Hall, facilitated recovery circles while in my own recovery, and worked in mental health triage and crisis case management for unhoused people.I have also studied, lived, and worked in Costa Rica with indigenous communities. I worked as a Spanish bilingual paraeducator in the special needs department and as an enrichment program director at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco and the Boulder Valley School district for a total of 10 years.

I am committed to consistently navigating power dynamics, inspired by Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and believe that my predominantly Latinx elementary students taught me much more than I did them. I sometimes still teach yoga & storytelling as social-emotional tools in schools, in partnership with the counseling and enrichment departments. I have taught workshops at Front Range Community College across the last 5 years and have taught diversity focused poetry classes and workshops at UC Berkeley, Community College of San Francisco, Naropa University, and beyond.

Pedagogy: Our mission is that all writers are heard. For Vola, this means that we specifically offer tools and practices for writers, particularly anyone who identifies as a woman, to write their books in community. These are often books that contain trauma, that have been difficult to write in isolation. We use the chakras as a somatic framework to write the book, write the body, and write the breath. The goal of the Birth Your Book book sales is to donate a portion to a Southeast Asian nonprofit   as yoga originates in this part of the world . I am in process, as a U.S. yoga instructor, of unraveling my own participation in cultural appropriation and engaging in workshops with Susanna Barkataki, among others, for guidance and support.

Vola has worked extensively with low-income participants through offering scholarships and with blind participants, as well as neurodiverse, racially diverse, and otherwise diverse writers. Vola hired a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion coach in 2020, began holding DEI discussions with alumni of the program, intentionally hires a diverse support team  (75% women of color,) outreaches to diverse groups of writers, and teaches from a constructive, collaborative framework where the students also become the teachers  (and also contribute to the scholarship fund). Alumni will begin facilitating workshops and are encouraged to utilize buddy systems and community writing rooms to decentralize power in the community. A lot of this framework is inspired by Bell Hooks’ Teaching to Transgress and June Jordan’s Poetry for the People:  A Revolutionary Blueprint. To address power dynamics, I do the same exercises as my students. I must always be writing and learning with them.

Activism: I have been active in the Black Lives Matter movement, curbside compost with EcoCycle, marijuana legalization with funding to schools, Pride events, the Women’s March, and RepresentUs, drawing new district voting lines so that all voices are heard.

Mentors: Lyna Nguyen, James Lin, Isoke Femi, Erik Ludwig, Sarah Rimmel (Slow Integration Coaching), Susanna Barkataki (Yoga Class Curator/Embrace, don’t appropriate, yoga)

Note: All this being said, I believe the most important part of DEI work is a willingness to admit when we are wrong, to learn, and to grow. I am constantly making mistakes. And I am dedicated to the conversations and actions that it takes to clean up these mistakes and do better next time, always. We will never find equity and true inclusion if we cannot have open, honest, and humble discourse.