Like you, I have to eat, so I sell some of my skills. Also like you, I’m much more than working to survive. ShawnFleek.com contains my professional portfolio, as well as personal creative projects. This website, like me, contains multitudes. I’m a professional in strategy, storytelling, and organizational development, working exclusively for the good guys. You can hire me via my consulting group, Summon Monster. Read on to hear more about me as a person.
I’m a proud Hinen (Northern Arapaho man), dad, husband, and nerd. I grew up in a sleepy rust belt town where manufacturing is the only industry. Both of my parents were factory workers, and poor. My maternal grandmother and grandfather raised me. She was a Native American artist and community-builder, and gave me pride in my Native identity and a fierce determination to serve my community. He was a Russian immigrant and electrician, and introduced me to personal computers and personal grit. 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.
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, I was arrested at the 2003 New York City demonstration against the second Iraq War, and then tear gassed for the first time at the anti-FTAA protests in Miami. I was an editor of my 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. I have produced political rap records, advancing my values through hip-hop culture. I have performed comedy in the theater, using humor to grow community investment in the values I upheld. For nearly two decades, I have served social justice movements and causes, such as serving my local Native American community, supporting environmental justice organizers and conservation leaders, recruiting for youth civic engagement organizers, electing candidates to office, supporting corporate initiatives rooted in truth-telling and building a stronger community, and participating in mass spectacles like Occupy Portland, the longest-sustained Occupy protest in the United States. And all the while, I’ve written poems, stories, essays, books, roleplayed characters, run D&D campaigns, and cooked delicious meals informed by many years working in kitchens and even more years practicing my culinary craft at home. I play guitar and piano, sing and write songs, and love to dance. I am married, with two children, and live in a beautiful home in Portland, Oregon where I’ve learned how to install flooring, hang shelves, plumb sinks, and hire contractors to do things I’m too scared to do myself.
My toolkit as a professional has helped me to identify a mission, vision, and values that guide me in my life and in my work.
I value optimism, storytelling, justice, honesty, and imagination.
I make it my personal mission to activate the skills, strengths, and creative potential of every human to achieve a new humanity and a future we have yet to imagine.
Today, humanity experiences material, mental, social, and spiritual confinement. This is the cage that stifles the growth and development of the human beings our living world needs. Stifled humans live in a bleak cycle, and most don’t have the luxury to think beyond the bars of our cage. We didn’t end up here by chance. Monsters put us here. By the way, monsters are real, and they suppress the historic truth that they put us in this cage.
I have a vision of cage free futures, where people reclaim our control over our destiny. We relearn forgotten truths, break the bars that confine us, name and slay the monsters that imprisoned us, and grow in the absence of these horrors to become even more human, and achieve gleaming, technicolor futures. Materially, humans have plenty, but no human has too much. Mentally, all humans are brilliant and wise and well, but no human controls minds, gatekeeps knowledges, or suppresses wisdoms. Spiritually, humans are proud, but no human is supreme. Socially, humans are connected and connectors, but no human mediates our connection.
If you are someone you know may have been victim to confinement by a monster, please reach out. Operators are standing by.