I am an art teacher. What I love about teaching is advocating for kids and giving them a voice. I am also an inner-kid advocate for all humans with developmental trauma. I like to give kids a voice and help them have freedom of expression.

I am also an artist. I like to provide kind community arts workshops where people who have never tried art get a chance to experience what it’s like to work with different mediums. Art has always been the only thing that has never left me, and that I could always turn to for help. When I don’t have words, I can express through art––and I want to give that gift to other people too.

Growing up I never had any visibility as a person. There was nowhere for me to turn to for help growing up––even through adulthood. It wasn’t until I found peer-support spaces that I was able to feel seen and experience chosen family, connecting with others intentionally focused on kindness who, like me, were struggling with feeling invisible.

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My hope is that I can be a safe advocate of new experiences for those who are struggling to find kind community. I want to offer art as a tool to bring people together and encourage people to be brave and try new experiences like I did, because that’s how I found my chosen family.

For a long time I searched for ways to feel better inside. I served in the military and I offered selfless service in underserved communities, hoping that helping others could help me find freedom and peace in my own life. While that service made a meaningful difference for many people––I still felt isolated and that something was missing.

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Eventually, I turned to mountain climbing. I thought that reaching the top of a mountain might make me feel whole or at least help me escape the anguish I was carrying. For a long time I needed extreme challenges just to feel something beyond the weight I was living with.

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But even on mountaintops, I realized I was still missing what I needed most: people. I wasn't finding the kind of relationships where I could truly belong, build community, and walk through life alongside others. More than another achievement, I just needed kind people around me. Healing doesn't happen in isolation. It happens when we feel seen, valued, and connected to others.

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That's why I am committed to helping build the kind of community I wish I had when I needed it most. My hope is to bring people together, help them feel welcome, and create spaces where everyone belongs. I believe that when people care for one another, extraordinary things are possible.

Coming from backgrounds of having experienced profound unkindness, finding kind people has just been a matter of survival––needing more kind people, more kind environments, and more kind formats in order to be able to exist at all, really. Kindness was what we needed. And we’ve had to figure it out backwards––what is kindness? How do we increase kindness and what blocks kindness? Normally bios describe things about what people enjoy doing in their spare time––but We've not experienced a life that has spare time yet. We also have not experienced a life that has hobbies yet. We know and love many people with both visible and invisible disabilities needing to find community that is accessible for them. To support that, we are creating spaces where people can feel be safe enough to be vulnerable and where different needs and disabilities are thoughtfully accommodated. In our search for kind people and spaces, we have met so many others who also have needs that were not being acknowledged or accommodated. Together we are building formats and aids for daily living that support ourselves and others to build more kind community.

I'm Lance Hicks. I use he/him pronouns. I'm an organizer and social worker looking forward to making friends and building community. I started off providing support to people in crisis through peer-to-peer, youth-led crisis support and street outreach, when I was in high school. after 20 years spent doing mutual aid, community organizing, street outreach, community education, and harm reduction / case management / crisis work, I decided to get my MSW and completed clinical training in a workforce development program focused on developing clinicians to serve in our county's public mental health system. 

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Although I am grateful for both the knowledge and the access that my social work training and license has afforded me, I also struggle daily with internal conflict about the ways in which becoming a "professional" holds me back, separates me from my communities, and implicates me non-consensually in actions and processes that I perceive to be harmful to myself, my community, and to those I care for and support. 

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I still have not figured out whether or not I think social work can fit within my personal value system; however, my professional training has never been the important part of how I show up. I think that what I learned as a youth supporting my friends and community in struggle has been what best prepared me for the work I do to support others today -- whether I am doing that work in a professionalized setting, or as an organizer, a friend, a neighbor, or any other role or context that might arise. I am grateful to be able to support my friends and community in building more kind efforts.

I work as a social worker, and have for a good while.  People kept referring out their most traumatized folks to me, and I ended up with far more people than I could effectively help –– I'm just one guy, and helping folks an hour or two at a time.  An hour or two was not nearly enough - most of the folks I was working with lacked any kind of functional family (some had very dangerous families), or any kind of functional community. This was a problem that I could not solve an hour at a time.  It (eventually) occurred to me that my folks needed community, and if I really wanted to help them, then I would help them build community. The needs far exceeded what I could in a hour or two at a time as a therapist. A lot of the folks I was seeing didn’t so much need therapy,  but needed far more basic things first. Things like a real emergency contact, or a person to go with them to the hospital when sick, or a person to make and eat dinner with.  Maybe a person who would come and see them when they were scared, and would actually be there with them.  This makes therapy for them difficult at best - it's hard to experience support or connection for only an hour a week, and to be paying for that on top. This reality led me to shift my focus from helping individuals one at a time to helping folks build the conditions the kinds of community and support they really needed first.  

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As life becomes more difficult, more people are being told to seek therapy for their suffering. A lot of people are suffering struggle from the effects of isolation, a lack of resources, and actual insecurity. Those folks need to have those needs met prior to everything else.  It’s hard to do therapy when a person is literally drowning.  

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Every person needs a village - most acutely children, but everyone.  All of us. If we want a sustainable life, we need a village.  If that village is not existent, i believe that the only recourse is to build that village.  A functional community requires more than geographical proximity. A functional community does require structure, shared reality, and shared resources - at least to some significant degree.  My efforts here are focused on creating the frameworks, formats, and systems to help people from different or similar conditions to experience safety, connection, and community.

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Also, I have a daughter with a disability - Downs Syndrome.  Because of the visibility of her disability, she has access to the kinds or resources and supports that greatly exceed what her mom and I could provide by ourselves - resources that she really, sincerely needs.   Visible disabilities like Down Syndrome get acknowledged socially in ways that more invisible disabilities  - such as the effects of abuse, trauma, and neglect - are not. I want to change that, so that all people get the same kinds of consideration, kindness,  and support, regardless of how visible their disability might be.