Meet Kris, City Bureau’s new Documenters Network Manager

This talented facilitator and program manager is joining our team to streamline our processes and equip us with resources to strengthen our Documenters programs across the country.

By Christian Aldana

We are excited to welcome Kris to the team as City Bureau’s new Documenters Network Manager! Kris brings their strong background in non-profit administration, consulting, project management, and trauma-responsive and healing-centered facilitation to help City Bureau’s Documenters Network thrive. Based in Philadelphia, Kris’s experiences growing up as an immigrant and working in youth and arts spaces have shaped their approach to building processes that foster trust, safety, and connection. They’re passionate about creating the internal structures that allow people to focus on what they do best, and dream up new ways of doing the work.

We asked Kris 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.

What are the places you call home? What is your connection to each place?

Home has always been a changing thing for me. I’m an immigrant from Jamaica. I moved here [to the US], grew up in New York City in Queens. So I think the three places I call home are Jamaica, New York City, and Philly–where I'm based now. From my experience of being an immigrant, I've been lucky to kind of find ways to make home where I am, by building community, by being curious about what's around me. When I’ve visited other places, I learned a lot about them by walking around and just taking notice of what the architecture is like, what types of businesses are up, peeking at who's frequenting those spaces, and just getting a sense of this space around me.

Also, I try to get to know a space via the arts scene. That's how I got to know Philly. I moved here to study social work for graduate school and when I started working in arts education with young people and with teaching artists in the city, that’s how I really got to know the city. Learning the city through the arts scene really helped me to fall in love with Philly in a lot of ways.

A lot of how I got to know New York was through going through the public school system myself, and then working with young people via leadership programs: teaching them about economic justice and doing popular education programs. That really formed me.

Tell us about your facilitation work. What does it mean to bring a trauma-responsive and healing-centered approach to this?

Facilitation is my favorite art form. I see it as a practice and try to keep my toe in different spaces where I get to facilitate whenever possible. I think there's a power to the intentional containers that we can build for people. Spaces often don't just crop up. Some intentional humans came together and said, “Hey, we want to build this thing,” and then moved together to create a space where people could feel welcome and designing it with folks in mind, so everyone could show up, let their minds rest a little bit, let their shoulders down, so that they could then focus on the work at hand.

Sometimes our work is really, really difficult. We're working on things that have no one answer, that take a long time and are about intentional forward motion. I see facilitation as being a practice of taking off the burdens of [creating] the structure and the container so people can really focus on the relationships in the room and have those conversations [they need to have] .

I began to learn about trauma responsiveness and healing-centered approaches when I was working in the arts and I got connected to a group that wanted to teach more artists about trauma, because many artistic/creative modalities are medicines for trauma. I feel really grateful that I got to take those courses over many years, and now I actually teach those courses to other folks.

One of the biggest things that I've learned about trauma, and trauma-responsive facilitation, is the importance of humility. I know that we may never know all of what somebody has been through, and there are some universal things I can put in place to create a space where people feel like they can come and feel cared for.

Another thing I learned is the importance of building spaces for connection. We're social creatures; we need each other in deep ways. Creating spaces where people actually get to build relationships with each other and keeping that as a foundational thing, beyond the content of whatever we're doing.

And then there’s trust-building, which can be quite a tricky thing. With trauma-responsive facilitation, for me, part of building trust is creating some sense of consistency, rhythm, and ritual so that folks know what we are here for. Also, creating space for feedback and then following up on that feedback to close loops allows for trust-building.

Trauma can leave people feeling really stagnant. Moving into a space of healing means that they might be able to ask more questions, and they might be able to see one more possibility than they did when they started. And that often comes from folks in a room just being able to share with each other, feeling seen, and going from there.

How do you hope to bring these approaches to facilitation to our work with Documenters?

I really believe in and am interested in nurturing the nurturers. In this role, I'm supporting the network coordinators who are then supporting the sites, so I get to help to build really strong processes that help us to get closer to our work, to take away some of the barriers, and to streamline what we can–[because] I know that our work is incredibly emergent–so that we can focus our creative energy on the things that need it. I hope to also create spaces where folks feel nurtured throughout the work on our internal team and throughout the network – the Documenters, the site staff around the country, and all the folks out there on the ground doing the work of creating a public record. I believe that I can do anything difficult if I don't have to do it alone, so creating the space where we can remember that we’re not alone, to me, is really exciting.

What is it about City Bureau’s work that you feel connected to, excited about, curious about?

I’m unlearning the individualism that I gained from my experiences in this country. Growing up, it was often seen as a strength if somebody could just do something by themselves and fight their way through. I'm very intrigued and excited by the idea of City Bureau’s work because, in practice, it's all about how we need each other.

So much of City Bureau’s work, particularly with the Documenters program, is about going out, showing up in spaces, documenting, learning [information], and bringing it back so we can all look at it together, so we can create a public record and journalism that pushes the boundaries of our work and our world. We're building a thing and while we don't fully know where we'll go, we are grounded in principles, which act as a compass that will get us there. We'll keep iterating and we'll keep learning. I'm really drawn to the values alignment that I've found here, to the integrity of the work, and to the people powered-ness.

Thinking about your work at City Bureau and beyond, what kind of communities do you hope to build?

I hope to build communities where we can demystify systems – the way that systems are set up, the way the infrastructure is built in this country (and any country) — so we can understand why things are occurring. In a space like the Documenters Network, there are of course nuances in what's happening in each community, and there are things that repeat at scale. If we can start seeing that and then ask each other, “What are you learning over there about how you're approaching that?” then we can build communities where people are able to really ground into their context, trust themselves and what they're seeing, and also reach out [to each other] because there's so much learning to be had across different contexts.

I want to build communities that operate across silos, that are able to look at systems together. Spaces where people can dream up something different than what is right now. Spaces where people can be vulnerable, and process what it is like for them on the day-to-day to be going through what they're going through, so that they don't have to hold that alone. That feels exciting.

I feel grateful that I'm standing in a legacy of many folks that have come before that have made this work possible. I feel excited to be able to continue it, and for all the folks at our different sites around the country who are creating more room for people to have the information that they need, so that they can self-determine what they want to build and what steps they want to take to move forward. That feels like a dream.

To connect with Kris, feel free to reach out at kris@citybureau.org.