Today we’d like to introduce you to Lynn Cowles.
Hi Lynn, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
As a soccer player, music lover, book-clubber, and sister to two brothers, I have a long history of playing on all kinds of teams. My work and life experiences are steeped in strategic communications, program management, organization development, research, and network outreach and management. Since moving to Austin, Texas in 2008, I’ve worked as a nonprofit consultant, community organizer, event coordinator, educator, researcher, writer, and communications consultant. I finished my PhD in Humanities Research at the University of Texas in Austin in 2015 and now work in communications, community engagement, research, and public health policy and advocacy at Foundation Communities. My broad career goal is to work with people to improve individual, family, and community outcomes by increasing access to quality healthcare, equal education, and community resources. Equal justice, campaign finance reform, and anti-gerrymandering initiatives drive my activism, and I’m a proud volunteer of the Austin Justice Coalition, KOOP Radio, the Autism Society of Texas, and the Austin Museum of Art. Loving Texas sunshine, I spend a lot of my free time bicycling around town and swimming at Barton Springs. On Friday afternoons, I also bartend at the Hole in the Wall, one of Austin’s finest live music venues. I live for good conversation and good hugs, and I’m grateful for this opportunity to share.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey have been a fairly smooth road?
Living in the world is a daily challenge and poses substantial obstacles for many of our local and global friends, neighbors, and families. My work attempts to recognize the broad systems of oppression that maintain the influence, functioning, and growth of capitalism, patriarchy, ableism, racism, misogyny, and many other networks of power that keep community members from loving each other like we want to. I recognize and celebrate the abundance of humor, fortitude, right relationships, poetry, and complex gorgeousness that resist the power that corrupts, and I hold this space sacred to honor the womyn, BIPOC community members, women, folx, non-binary friends, transgender powerhouses, two-spirits, and/or gender-nonconforming community members whose daily triumphs—full of joy, pain, brilliance, mundanity, and critique—dismantle oppression.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
The Prosper Health Coverage program at Austin-based nonprofit Foundation Communities increases health equity and improves health outcomes for Texas’s diverse and awesome communities. Our amazing health coverage Navigators help people across the state identify and enroll in affordable health coverage programs that help keep them healthy and financially stable. We are public health educators, researchers, and advocates, and we help community members empower themselves and their friends, family, and neighbors be active in maintaining good health and community financial stability. As Senior Program Coordinator, I help support our staff by writing grants and helping manage grant opportunities, developing strategic communications, coordinating community education and outreach efforts, creating program tools and resources, and celebrating the incredible work we do with our community members every day.
What are your plans for the future?
Liberation, Landback, and Love. Radical Love. RIP bell hooks.
Contact Info:
- Email: Lynn.Cowles@foundcom.org
- Website: http://prosperhealthcoverage.org/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cowles5966/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lynn.cowles
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/cowles5966
- Other: https://www.ejnet.org/ej/jemez.pdf
Image Credits
Headshot: UT Austin; By the lake: Jonathan Piper; Black and white: Sarah Anderson; Chin hands: John Donofrio; Mask photo: Jeremiah Cleveland Jenkins.
