Johnnie Shaver
Hi, I’m Johnnie. I’ve been organizing with unhoused, Black, Indigenous, Communities of Color, and LGBTQIA+ communities for more than 20 years. As a child and young adult, I experienced being unhoused and food insecure, and today I navigate the world as a visibly fat, queer and transgender person. This lived experience brings a unique perspective to my work and drives my passion for it.
Professionally, I have experience creating, coordinating, and managing many community projects, including a community food box home delivery program, summer cooling and winter warming stations, and a monthly food pantry program centering transgender and gender non-conforming communities. I’ve coordinated hundreds of volunteers, cultivated collaborations with organizations like Rahab’s Sisters, Stop the Sweeps, and PDX Trans Housing Coalition, and served on the board of the Montavilla Neighborhood Association, where I created the Housing & Homelessness Committee and Neighborhood Support Fund.
I strive to create trusting, authentic relationships with communities, approaching them with the knowledge that the cycles of poverty and injustice that perpetuate poverty are created by the system and its structures, and not the people suffering under them. My work is rooted in racial, class, and gender justice, and my goal is to work in collaboration with communities to identify the care they need, and to develop service models and policies that honor their dignity and agency.
In the last decade I’ve designed and facilitated more than 65 trainings and workshops focused on trauma-informed, harm reduction centered community care, civil rights, and skill building for justice-drive community engagement. I currently facilitate 8-10 workshops per year on topics such as Food As Harm Reduction, Intro to Transgender & Non-binary Allyship, Trauma Informed Spaces, and Client Engagement Best Practices for Oregon Food Bank. These are tailored for communities, volunteers, leadership teams, and nonprofit boards throughout the country. I also serve as a consultant to food programs that are seeking to design trauma informed client service experiences.
Values + Commitments
All of my work will be grounded in the understanding that nothing is trauma informed if it is not explicitly anti-racist, anti-colonial, and justice-driven. I also work from an understanding that it is the system and its structures, not the people suffering under them, that create the cycles of white supremacy and injustice which perpetuate poverty.
Whiteness ensures that I will be imperfect in pursuit of these values, but I prioritize them in all aspects of my life, anyway, because my liberation is connected to the liberation of all historically targeted and excluded peoples. Please expect these values and perspectives to be woven throughout my consulting work, curriculum building, community organizing, collaborations, and my personal life.