April Featured Author | Crystallee Crain, Ph.D.
Welcome to our featured author series where we share different points of view on advancing social justice and DEI+B efforts through the ever evolving fields of multicultural organizational development, human resources, implementation science, equitable evaluation and applied research, improvement science, learning science, performance measurement, and team science.
Each month we highlight someone in this work we admire and have learned from in the past. Our hope is that you find new perspectives, ideas, and insights to inspire and challenge the way you live and work.
Crystallee Crain, Ph.D.
Founder & Principal Consultant, Prevention at the Intersections • Founder, The Everly Collective
Crystallee Crain Ph.D. (she/her/hers) is an interdisciplinary public health scholar and human rights activist. She has academic roots in sociology, political science, and psychology. She specializes in exposing the layers of institutional inequality while supporting communities to shift ways of being and practice to improve life chances by bridging the worlds of academia, healing, and activism. Crystallee’s body of work represents a collective need to strengthen our responses to violence through transformative means, the need for liberatory practices, and a focus on healing as a revolutionary strategy for change. Crystallee holds an academic appointment with California State University – East Bay Department of Political Science; and Simmons University in the Masters of Public Health - Program. She’s also the elected board chair of Seeding Justice Foundation (PDX). Dr Crain recently published the 2nd edition of her textbook A People’s Primer: Dispatches on Politics & Social Change (Kendall Hunt Publishing)
Crystallee is the Founder & Principal Consultant of Prevention at the Intersections, an organization that works to prevent violence through community-based research and people-centered projects. At Prevention at the Intersections, she publishes two open-access journals CATALYST and The Beauty of Black Creation, and facilitates training with an emphasis on trauma, prevention science, and community capacity-building. She has worked with organizations across the country to support them in actualizing their values in the development and implementation of their mission and vision. Clients have included: UC - San Francisco, APANO, Justice Outside (California), King County (Seattle), The Oregon Alliance, San Francisco Children of Incarcerated Parents Partnership (SFCIPP), Community Cycling Center, Youth on Root, and Dress for Success Oregon. You can learn more about her at www.preventionagenda.org, www.bestlifecoach.co and www.crystalleecrain.org.
Why do you do the work you do?
From an early age, I knew that I wanted to spend my time contributing to the betterment of the world. As a child, doing what I now understand as conflict resolution on the playground; or as a teenager writing poetry about the South African apartheid; or later in life when I began my coaching practice. All of these things are focused on alleviating suffering or gaining a greater understanding of what we can do to prevent harm in the future.
In my heart, I’ve always felt a deep understanding of the ways that people are impacted by social, economic, and political systems. The utter lack of agency and sense of belonging in our society is damaging and has stunted our growth as humans. Because of this situation causing harm, experiencing violence, in its many forms, is commonplace and expected.
Living in an inequitable society has taught me that it’s not just systems that allow for such experiences to exist, but it’s people. Individuals and groups make decisions to uphold the status quo rather than shift ways of being to improve life chances for all. I live in the latter space of building our collective capacity to heal from colonialism's wounds.
My work is multi-faceted and across various sectors. Overall, I consider myself to be a pragmatic disrupter, healer, and experimenter. Most recently, I’ve leaned into the need of having a healing justice center in Flint, Michigan (my hometown). I believe in the power of community, care, and justice as crucial elements to our ability to heal and thrive in the face of systemic oppression. To help facilitate that, I have purchased a building to host holistic and alternative healing practitioners in Flint and support the many individuals and groups locally who have for so long stewarded the cause for healing and peace. Learn more at www.theeverlycollective.org.
What technique, method, tool, theory or practice would you like to highlight that is promising and/or proven for advancing social justice?
At the center of this tool, created by Deepa Iyer (2017), The Social Change Map Framework focuses on equity, liberation, justice, and solidarity. It’s brilliant to me because instead of focusing on issue areas or sectors, it focuses on roles and points of engagement within our social change ecosystem.
I thoroughly enjoy Renee Linklaters book, Decolonizing Trauma Work: Indigenous Stories and Strategies. This book resonates with me as it puts the wound in our society of colonialism as a primary focal point in healing. In this book, Linklater emphasizes methods for working with individuals and communities that have experienced trauma.
Last year, at Prevention at the Intersections we developed a Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging & Accessibility tool for our clients and training participants. This one-page handout Frameworks for Action & Analysis helps people understand how to put these ideals into action.
What are one or two practices, resources, and/or tools that help you live more into your values on the daily?
I regularly use the Wisdom App. It’s a different kind of social media where you connect with others through questions and responses. One of my favorite questions I received was about my childhood. The question was: Describe your childhood in 59 seconds? It took me two weeks to come up with a concise story. It was such a thought-provoking question and it gave me some insight on my growth, understanding, and care for my family. Check out this article for more about the App.
Another regular practice I have is sound meditation. Last year I was able to purchase Equisync. They are a company based out of San Francisco. Their sound meditation program is scientific and well made. Depending on the track, I find it soothing or energizing at any point in time during the day or night. Equisync - Sound meditation (they have a free demo).
Below are some resources I share with my clients and others.
What are some books you wish everyone would read?
Decolonizing Trauma Work: Indigenous Stories and Strategies by Renee Linklater
In Decolonizing Trauma Work, Renee Linklater explores healing and wellness in Indigenous communities on Turtle Island. Drawing on a decolonizing approach, which puts the “soul wound” of colonialism at the centre, Linklater engages ten Indigenous health care practitioners in a dialogue regarding Indigenous notions of wellness and wholistic health, critiques of psychiatry and psychiatric diagnoses, and Indigenous approaches to helping people through trauma, depression and experiences of parallel and multiple realities.
Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019 by Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain
Four Hundred Souls is a unique one-volume “community” history of African Americans. The editors, Ibram X. Kendi and Keisha N. Blain, have assembled ninety brilliant writers, eighty of whom takes on a five-year period of that four-hundred-year span with ten lyrical interludes from poets. The writers explore their periods through a variety of techniques: historical essays, short stories, personal vignettes, and fiery polemics. They approach history from various perspectives: through the eyes of towering historical icons or the untold stories of ordinary people; through places, laws, and objects. While themes of resistance and struggle, of hope and reinvention, course through the book, this collection of diverse pieces from ninety different minds, reflecting ninety different perspectives, fundamentally deconstructs the idea that Africans in America are a monolith—instead it unlocks the startling range of experiences and ideas that have always existed within the community of Blackness.
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