Meet Christi Strickland

By Abby Killey

Christi Strickland is Alpenglow’s youngest member and possibly one of our most qualified cohousers. Christi has devoted her professional life to facilitating personal and group  growth and communication.  She blends a love of nature with a desire to help people grow in community both in her career and her support of Alpenglow CoHousing.

Expressing how her passion for nature and for community are united in her work with Alpenglow, she writes, “One of the beautiful things about living in community connected to and so close to Nature is that the Earth has a lot to teach us about resilience, creativity, and collaboration.”

Christi’s work in community building and group facilitation began long before getting involved in Alpenglow. After graduating from Naropa University with a master’s degree in transpersonal counseling, with an emphasis in ecopsychology, an organization that trains facilitators and consults with organizations. The Matrixworks model looks at groups from a living systems point of view.

She learned through her experience as housing director at Naropa that group and communication skills would greatly benefit the community living there and designed a course: Group Dynamics and Leadership: Creating Compassionate Community. She went on to teach variations of this experiential course for the next 15 years.

In addition to her teaching career, Christi turned to working as a therapist. She has worked as a therapist in jails and for hospice, and currently provides therapy services for at-risk youth who have experienced trauma, neglect and abuse. This contribution to the community is big enough, yet Christi finds time to support several other endeavors that demonstrate her passion for nurturing community healing and growth.

As a member of the Ridgway Spirit Fest program team, Christi’s 2021 workshop centered on communication and community in polarized times. At the workshop, Christi helped participants learn principles for communicating across differences. Participants in the workshop, as in the monthly “Bridging the Gap” meetings that Christi facilitates, practiced talking about meaningful and potentially politically charged topics. 

She teaches grounding skills and tips for conducting dialogues that integrate many points of view. She emphasizes grounding practices and encourages setting compassionate boundaries. She witnesses genuine connection and freedom when people are given an opportunity to share in this way. She finds joy in experiencing the “third way” that often results when people genuinely and courageously work through seemingly disparate views. She believes that unexpectedly beautiful things happen when our good and shared intentions, combined with honest dialogue, prevail.

Two other groups that Christi supports include the Wilderness Guide Council (WGC) and the Time Bank of the Rockies. She serves as the co-executive director of the WGC, a global networking organization that helps people access growth, healing and inspiration through nature-based rights of passage. She is a member of the Time Bank of the Rockies, which facilitates an exchange system of services.

Christi is looking forward to the caring that a cohousing community can provide, and to having a social place to unwind from her deep and intense professional work. As other members have noted, the inclination toward isolation is not necessarily the best means to unwind in these challenging times. She loves the part of our vision statement that envisions creating a simpler life. “Creating simplicity at home is a welcome and much needed respite,and allows us to meet the complexities of relationships and our changing world.”

When asked to identify the personal growth challenges she might face in living in the Alpenglow CoHousing community, Christi hinted at the very human problem of practicing what she teaches. She knows she will have to try hard to set compassionate boundaries for herself. She also hopes to be able to occasionally see what might happen when she can let go of her role as “communication specialist” and allow others space and opportunity to work on those areas – to make room for a third way.

Alpenglow member Christi Strickland pictured in nature on the left, and on the right with Justine Willis Toms, keynote speaker at the October 2021 Ridgway Spirit Fest, an annual event designed to advance awareness through understanding of varied paths, faiths, cultures, philosophies and wisdom traditions.