I’m Shawn Fleek, a Hinen (Northern Arapaho) professional management consultant for hire. My work provides nonprofits, businesses, and political campaigns resources for shaping public narrative. I specialize in strategic storytelling, directing the creation of multimedia, navigating relationships with the press, and public speech preparation and coaching. This work is rooted in the thoughtful, rapid deployment of the written word and compelling content through digital and print channels, toward shaping organizations’ understanding of themselves, and decision-makers’ understanding of the systems around them. Throughout my career I’ve focused on community economic development and community engagement that achieves social and economic justice, with a particular focus on climate justice and the movement for a just transition. My clients include elected and appointed officials, high-profile candidate and ballot measure campaigns, internationally-recognized nonprofits, and some of the biggest corporations on the planet. My work has entered hundreds of millions of homes – likely including yours.
I’ve been using words to change the world since I was 16. I produced zines and fliers and distributed political propaganda at hometown punk rock shows. My politics weren’t particularly well-formed, but I was influential. I organized a student walkout my sophomore year, and won concessions from the administration of my school. The power of organizing, by telling an undeniable story, rocked me. While attending Antioch College, between arrests at the 2003 New York City demonstration against the second Iraq War, and being tear gassed for the first time at the anti-FTAA protests in Miami, I was an editor of the campus newspaper, and used my platform to deliver unifying messages during difficult community moments. I have self-published more than a dozen zines, filled with joyous resistance to dominant systems. For four years, I produced political rap records, advancing my values through hip-hop culture. For seven years, I performed comedy in the theater, using humor to grow community investment in the values I upheld. For the last decade, I’ve staffed a variety of nonprofits as a development and communications professional – serving my local Native American community, environmental justice organizers, youth civic engagement organizers, and Occupy Portland, the longest-sustained Occupy protest in the United States. My work has moved millions of dollars, thousands of people to take to the streets, vote, or volunteer, pushed billion-dollar public institutions to act favorably, hundreds of individuals to become grassroots members, and moved the needle on issues of environmental justice and civil rights across the state of Oregon. I’ve registered thousands of people to vote myself, helped elect women of color to high office, advanced progressive values throughout global crises, and weathered the intense dissatisfaction of perpetually-aggrieved activists.
I have spent some span of my life in varied roles such as poet, rapper, comedian, singer, songwriter, producer of stage and screen, playwright, radio announcer, disc jockey, internet troll, and unrepentant serial comma enthusiast. Today, I tell my story as follows: I grew up in a sleepy town where manufacturing is the only industry. Both of my parents were factory workers, and poor. My maternal grandmother and grandfather raised me. She is Native American and Spanish, and gave me pride in my Native identity and a fierce determination to serve my community. He was a Russian electrician, and introduced me to personal computers. My grandmother gave me values, and my grandfather gave me the blank canvas of the word processor. Poverty and small-town isolation conspired to give me all the time I needed to become a writer. My words are my life’s work.
My official work portfolio is at shawnfleek.wordpress.com. I am also the owner of Summon Monster, a public relations firm I founded for those who wish to employ me as an independent contractor.