Lauren Whitmer is an experienced bilingual researcher, educator, trainer, technical advisor, product developer, project manager, community organizer and advocate with evaluation experience. She has over 17 years’ experience doing research and advocacy work around gender-based violence (GBV) in diverse settings. She understands how GBV, including intimate partner violence (IPV), is deeply embedded in larger socio-cultural systems and practices, and how it interacts with racism, immigration status, language spoken, ableism, heterosexism, socioeconomic class and other systems of oppression. An effective communicator for diverse audiences (academic and practice-focused, English and Spanish, oral and written), Whitmer has experience working with numerous local organizations and universities as a GBV trainer, advocate and educator. She has a unique ability to understand and connect individual experiences to larger family, community and societal structures, and is able to gather and synthesize large amounts of complex information to inform planning, identify options and evaluate effectiveness. She is skilled at tailoring materials and content for different groups and circumstances.
The central themes of her work include a) gender based violence (GBV) as a socio-cultural phenomenon and its relationships to other complex problems like substance use, b) how individuals navigate complex socio-cultural landscapes, intersecting identities and power structures, c) how institutions navigate fields and regulatory/legal systems and d) community-driven social justice and social change movements, including harm-reduction approaches to IPV and substance use.