Since my 6th grade campaign to get a salad bar in my middle school cafeteria, activism and organizing has been profoundly central to my movement in the world.
Highlights include my work to support Minneapolis community leader CeCe McDonald when she survived a racist and transmisogynist attack in our Minneapolis neighborhood and subsequently faced state violence and incarceration. A couple other media savvy folks and I spearheaded media strategizing, wrote press releases and articles, and generated mainstream and alternative press calling for an end to violence against trans women.
As a clinical psychologist today, I am thrilled work with my therapy practice and our partner non-profit Soul Soil Collective Farm supporting culturally-competent, evidence-based and ecology-informed holistic healing services including therapy, retreats, and other community programming that invite collaborators to deepen their relationships with and learn from local ecology, land, and the more-than-human world. We work in collaboration with Soul Soil Collective Farm to support access to land held in common for collective land-based healing by individuals/groups who face racist, generational, and classist barriers from access to land stewardship, especially Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, and gender and/or sexual minorities. We are currently fundraising and building a collaborator network to buy a farm between Baltimore and DC, and welcome hearing from folks interested in this mission!
I also seek to be an ally to organizers. If I can be any help to any work you’re doing — if any of my connections, access to resources, experiences, or skills could be useful to you in any way, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Colleagues and I published an article on building community resilience among communities targeted by state-sanctioned violence, with an accompanying toolkit of strategies for building and maintaining resilience while resisting state-sanctioned violence. We are available to consult about strategies to build and maintain community resilience resources in the work toward liberation for those resisting state-sanctioned violence — the best way to contact me is via my practice, Soul Soil Healing.
Kris Gebhard, PhD 