Lisa Marie Alatorre, MA is a community organizer, educator, and writer with over 20 years experience fighting for the abolition of imprisonment, policing, and oppression as a response to social problems and instead shifting towards care, healing, and transformation. Born and raised in Peoria, Arizona, she is currently based out of rural Washington state. She is a Queer Femme of Indigenous, Mexican, and Jewish descent.

As a consultant, she has worked with many different organizations and institutions around the United States that span the many sectors of our radical movements to end oppression and violence. Her work is rooted in her political belief that in order to build a world where we do not rely on police and prisons, we must ensure that we are equipped to respond to harm, conflict, oppression, and the constant threat of white supremacy. This often looks like supporting conflict mediation addressing interpersonal to organizational harm from various lenses that include Transformative Justice, Community Accountability, and Restorative Practices. This has also looked like supporting organizational approaches to dismantling white supremacy culture, integrating anti-oppression values and action steps in strategic planning, using anti-oppression and social justice as approaches to policy development and advocacy. Additionally she has facilitated traditional campaign planning and evaluation for coalitions and grassroots organizations.

She was formally trained in Public Policy and Community Organizing through the Master’s program at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration and as a fellow and trainer with the Women’s Policy Institute based in California. She learned many of her skills towards being Trauma-Informed and utilizing Harm Reduction as a social worker in Seattle and Chicago working with street-based and homeless adults and youth. As an organizer and policy advocate working statewide in  California and locally in the Bay Area, she learned the critical need for intentionally integrating values and practices of justice and decolonization into campaigns and policy wins. Lisa Marie currently works as an educator and writer, bringing together her many years of dynamic work into cohesive and accessible workshops and lectures for various education levels.

Lisa Marie’s work as a social worker, community organizer, and policy advocate have had direct impacts on preserving the rights of Black, Indigenous, & other people of color and homeless & poor people locally and nationally, including fighting back criminalization, incarceration, and demanding housing and basic needs. She has formally worked as a community organizer with movement organizations such as the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness and Critical Resistance. She is currently a part-time lecturer at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth’s Crime and Justice Studies department. She has served and continues to serve many boards, working groups, and steering committees related to the anti-violence movement, de-carceration and alternatives to incarceration, and direct service organizations.

Her long list of passions include voraciously reading, cooking+baking, community building and repairing, making/altering clothes, gardening and permaculture, volunteering, learning, writing, parenting, and media-making.

To contact Lisa Marie, email her at: lisa.alatorre[at]gmail.com