Kourtney is a highly creative and detail-oriented communicator with 10 years of visual design and written narrative for a diverse portfolio of climate and social justice centered organizations. They bridge the gap between design and strategy by blending eye-catching graphic design with intuitive user experiences that are grounded in market research. By leveraging data and SEO techniques they optimize site performance and transform virtual spaces into engaging, goal-driven digital journeys.
More about me
Throughout my youth and early adulthood I was a distributor of movement messaging related to the grassroots abolitionist efforts I was involved in to confront state violence. Simultaneously, I was building alternative community based infrastructures that addressed root causes of manufactured crime. By influence and kinship with Dineh and Hopi land protectors in my own community I began connecting the carceral state to the extractive industries who desecrated sacred sites, forests, rivers, flora, and fauna for profit. My journey has since led me into a professional visual design and communications role for Black and Indigenous farmers, Black cooperative business owners, labor organizers, climate justice advocates, Dineh environmental scientists, Land protectors, environmental lawyers, researchers, and policy makers, climate disaster survivors, and architects of renewable energy. It is an ancestral duty to show up for a healthy planet, stable climate, free people, and more deeply interconnected relationship with all beings in our respective environments.
Why are forests important to me
I am ancestrally based and born out of the Southwest (United States) and have spent my entire life in proximity to the world's largest contiguous ponderosa pine forest. My Papa Keith often took me and my siblings camping early in childhood and I accompanied him in his truck while we fearlessly sought out wildlife interactions at night. These core memories still bring me visceral feelings of intensity. It cannot be understated how deeply and profoundly connected we all are, including that we each have an inherent ecological role to fulfill in the places we inhabit.
Why Canopy
I deeply appreciate Canopy's ability to identify a tangible solution to the deforestation of Ancient and Endangered Forests. What is even more impressive is that Canopy is materializing a vision for a healthy planet and stable climate through long term relationship and trust building. A forest ecosystem has a similar model of success.
Ask me about
Fashion, diva house, collage art, user friendly design, history of social movements, and how hot my homegrown chili peppers are.
What ruffles my feather
Disconnection.
Spider monkeys are very agile, active, and communicate with a diversity of techniques. They have an impressive spatial memory and can categorize the data of hundreds of distinct fruit trees and ripening times across thousands of hectares of forest. Between my attention for detail, analytic tracking, creative communications background, love for sugary fruits, and disproportionately long arms for a small body, it might be true that I was a spider monkey in my past life.
