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Dr. Catherine R. Squires recently retired as Associate Dean of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota.  She is the author of multiple books on media, race, gender and politics, including Dispatches from the Color Line (2007) and The Post-Racial Mystique (2014), and the edited collection Dangerous Discourses: Feminism, Gun Violence & Civic Life (2016). She has engaged in multiple community partnerships in St. Paul to support intergenerational civic learning by lifting up local Black histories, supporting youth writers, and facilitating intergenerational conversations.

In 2017, Dr. Squires was named a Bush Fellow. Her fellowship focused on understanding intergenerational trauma, culturally relevant healing practices, embodied story sharing and gentle movement.  Through these explorations she became a certified yoga instructor and has ventured into memoir writing as a practice of healing and re-connection. Her first personal essay was published in the collection What God Is Honored Here?: Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss by & for Native Women & Women of Color,  edited by Kao Kalia Yang and Shannon Gibney (University of Minnesota Press, 2019).  

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I believe that race and gender justice are essential to making our communities and workplaces more effective for everyone! I am an enthusiastic, energetic leader and facilitator who strives to empower others to recognize and celebrate differences to create change in the individual and their communities. At RIA, I get to design experiences that create transformation in perspective, culture and behavior with folks who are just as passionate and willing to learn as I am.

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In 2014, Kamisha opened Amani Counseling, Consulting & Healing Services as an Independent Contractor Therapist at RiverValley Behavioral Health & Wellness Center focusing on individual, and group therapy. As Kamisha evolved and her passions heightened, she began to find herself shifting her lens to more racial & healing justice work. Currently Kamisha has facilitated Women & Girl Empowerment Groups, debriefings for staff, healing circles, mental health events and panels. Kamisha hosted with Protect Your Crown two Annual Mental Health Affairs panel discussions, vendors and networking. Kamisha has a passion for healing the community by focusing on mental health, and trauma through the use of healing driven modalities that include Shamanic practices, reiki, spiritual cleansing, drumming and other intuitive healing techniques. Kamisha’s ability to assist people in healing is profound and energetically powerful. She embraces her own childhood and adulthood traumas, successes and failures and channels all that pain and turns it into power!

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Stories, experiences, meaning-making and relationships drive my work and sustain me. I do community engaged and participatory action research on sex trading, human trafficking and community wellbeing. I began on this path with community partners in 2005. This is a radical departure from my theoretical PhD training in Anthropology. Once I started this work, I couldn't go back to academic business as usual. Over the years, I learned that humane processes and human connection in research are fundamental to building trust, engaging people with lived experience in meaning-making, and getting to the roots. This expertise and knowledge is critical for real and lasting social change. I am an associate professor at the University of Minnesota School of Nursing and am affiliated faculty at the Urban Research and Outreach-Engagement (UROC) and the Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Prior to that I was the director of research at UROC for almost ten years. As a person of European descent who grew up in the Twin Cities, I feel honored to co-create empirical knowledge in service of liberation, justice, and equity. As a consultant for RIA, I am passionate about supporting Dr. Lewis and the team as they work on the Missing and Murdered African American Women Task Force project. I love being a resource to support this dedicated team as they do challenging and difficult work.

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From my first career in journalism to more than 10 years in advocacy spaces, I seek to amplify and support the voices and expertise of communities most impacted by systemic racism and injustice. I bring skills around communications, graphic design, data visualization and narrative strategy to all the internal and external work of RIA to ensure that our efforts — and those of community leaders — are not just documented but put into action to create change that people can see and feel in their daily lives. I'm humbled and honored to work with such visionary leaders in the research space and collaborate with community experts across issue areas and geography.