Claire Caldwell
Facilitator
For ten years, Claire worked in social justice movement spaces. She got into this work because she wanted to contribute to impacting people’s lives for the better. As a digital campaigner and organizer, she believed in the power of social media and the internet as a democratizing force for good. She leveraged these digital tools to turn out everyday people to lobby for legislative change and turn out to vote. She’s proud to have contributed to passing non-discrimination protections for transgender people in New Hampshire, defending abortion access for people later in pregnancy in the safe haven state of Colorado, and winning labor rights for the immigrant-majority child care/early educator workforce in California.
During her time time in social justice movement spaces, her theory about how to impact people’s lives for the better began to change. She saw first hand that our digital tools are broken, engineered to literally incentivize division. As those of us hooked on these platforms train in tribalism, group-think, and rage-fueled comment wars, Claire noticed – even inside spaces where people agreed on a lot of things – cancel culture on the rise.
When she left social justice movement spaces, she took with her a cognitive dissonance of having watched people call for tolerance, diversity, equality, and sustainability while actively seeking to silence anyone who didn’t share their political ideology.
Since then, she’s been holding the question that Dr. Marshall B. Rosenberg, Ph.D poses at the beginning of his audiobook Nonviolent Communication: “What gets into us that turns us into violent people? And what can we do to maintain our compassionate nature?”
This is the question she brings to bear in the workshop The Peacemakers: Relating Across Lines of Difference in Polarized Times.
Claire has meaningful experiential trust in the power of love, compassion, and honesty to bridge divides, repair harm, and offer peace. She brings an open curiosity about what the world and what our quality of life might look like if we all had more training in relating, peacefully, across lines of difference. And she is thrilled to have space to practice, in community, with some tried and tested tools for peacemaking.
