This Chicago-based organizer, educator, and artist joins our team to develop responsive network-wide trainings and resources for site staff and Documenters around the country.
By Kris Smith
Portrait taken by Caroline Olsen
We are excited to welcome Christian to the team as City Bureau’s new Documenters Learning Manager!
Based in Chicago, Christian is an educator, artist, and community organizer with a background in program management and curriculum design. As an educator, they’ve worked with youth in Chicago Public Schools, in after-school arts programs, with community organizations serving immigrants and refugees, and in university cultural centers across the country. Their experiences as a community organizer and youth worker have informed their belief in equity, access, and empathy for people’s lived experiences. They value creating learning experiences that allow people to share power through sharing knowledge, honor people’s needs, and foster a sense of community. Christian is also the founder and co-director of Luya, a poetry organization that centers the stories and experiences of people of color.
We asked Christian (pronounced Chris-tee-YAHN) to share a little bit about their experiences, background, and what they’re bringing to the role. Here are some of the highlights, edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about your connection to Chicago and the other places where you call home?
I’ve lived in three different places in Southeast Asia and there are a lot of cultural commonalities between them. Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam and Cebu in the Philippines are places I consider to be home in some ways. Cebu is my ancestral land. I would love to return to it as an adult, even for a chunk of time because I was so young when I left.
Chicago is the place that really shaped me. I moved to Chicago in 2016. It was the first place in my life that I chose to move to on my own. I feel really rooted in this city. I care about the people that live in it and the decisions that are made by our government. I care about what our legislators are doing. I care about what is happening in our public schools. It’s the first place where I see myself as connected to the city and invested in what is going on in the city at a macro level. It makes sense that I ended up working somewhere like City Bureau that is deeply concerned with what is going on at the local level in the city.
You have a background in organizing and working as an educator and artist. Can you tell me about your path through these roles?
I was doing things that were precursors to organizing in college and have been doing art in some form throughout my life. As a young person, I didn’t know that you could do the kinds of things that I’ve done and am doing. I started my career in nonprofits, doing similar work to what I would later do as a youth organizer for Asian Americans Advancing Justice. I started my career in nonprofits, doing similar work to what I would later do as a youth organizer for Asian Americans Advancing Justice. However, in my earlier roles I lacked political clarity. When I worked in leadership development for young women in Southeast Asia, I really enjoyed the job—especially connecting with young people and their mentors, understanding how they learn, and how to create learning environments that help them reach their own goals for personal and professional development.
At the time, I was also finding my “voice” through my writing and I enjoyed the ways that writing and poetry can just open up space for people to reflect on themselves and the world around them. For people of color, in particular, creative writing can be a space where we can reclaim narratives that have been either warped or lost from us, reclaim connection to our histories, and write really frankly about the world as it is today. And then to go further, imagining the world that we can build in the future and describing that explicitly.
That all led me to living in Chicago. I got involved pretty quickly in the Filipino community here through cultural work and bridging art and writing practices with Filipino cultural practices, and using that for self-expression. I spent a lot of time volunteering and doing community work and began asking a lot of questions about why things were the way they were—noticing things were messed up, and wondering how to fix things that didn’t seem great for our people. I wanted to create learning environments where people can truly express their opinions, feel like we’re learning collectively, and feel like our learning is working toward some kind of shared goal.
What drew you to City Bureau and building with the Documenters Network?
Being a Documenter is something that anyone can do. When I was a barista, I would’ve tried to be a Documenter if I had known about it. Our work is about getting the widest possible swath of people to participate in local government. I love that you don’t need to be a journalist or come from a traditional journalism background to participate in the Documenters program or in any of City Bureau’s other programs.
I love that City Bureau presents Public Newsrooms where anyone can learn about the most pressing issues in their communities and get information that connects to people’s day to day lives.
When I think about what my work is grounded in, I am really inspired by the legacy of freedom schools, the reason they came into being, and what those educators and communities were able to do with those spaces. A lot of that is around the understanding that we are co-creators of knowledge and breaking down the hierarchy between student and teacher.
How do you approach creating spaces and resources for learning?
There was a community agreement that I heard in an intergenerational Filipino community space years ago. It was something like, “Everyone is an expert of their own experience.” It’s about understanding that my set of experiences and yours are unique and different and that’s not bad. Because of those experiences, we are the only ones that can speak on them in an “expert” way. We encourage folks to bring that in with them into the space. That really stuck with me.
When I’m facilitating a workshop, I remember that we all come from such different roots and have found ourselves together in this room to learn something new. I welcome reflections regarding how things are landing based on where they’re coming from. So, in our work, if I’m teaching a workshop for Documenters site staff about how to train their local Documenters, I know we care about everyone’s local context So I’m going to share, “Here are some best practices if you want to create this kind of impact in your local environment.” And then I’m going to ask participants, “What is your community like based on what I just shared? Which of these things do you feel are really necessary for your community? And which of these things maybe aren’t as resonant?”
Recognizing that we have all of these differences, how do we create a space where everyone–whether they’re a student, a mom of three, an uncle holding down three jobs–feels like they can learn about Documenters on a level playing field?
What are you looking forward to in your work at City Bureau?
I’m really looking forward to visiting sites. I’m so curious about how local government works in other cities. I’m really curious about how to build this community of Documenters in various spaces. In our Documenters program, I’m excited to make things easier for people. How can the resources and learning spaces that I create or provide, in collaboration with everyone on the team, free them up to do more of the things they’re the best at? How can I offer them an outline so they can run with it? That frees up time for them to spend one-on-one with a Documenter or plan a community event. That’s how I see my role and the importance of having someone or a group of people thinking about learning outcomes and learning management.
Something that I learned in my journey as an educator was that most of us, myself included, are not taught how to ask for what we need. We’re often taught that asking for help is a sign of weakness. I hope that—not just in a formal workshop setting, but in all settings where we collaborate as a team—we’re co-creating learning environments where we feel like we can ask for help. I find that we get work done faster and of higher quality when we work together.
To connect with Christian, feel free to reach out at christian@citybureau.org.