Kari Points

Kari Points has collaborated regularly with AORTA since 2018 to provide outstanding facilitation, consulting, and coaching work to our clients.

Kari Points is a white dyke based in Durham, North Carolina. She was raised working class in rural, conservative, Christian Southern Indiana. 

For more than 25 years, Kari has organized globally and domestically for collective liberation. Her content expertise is in racial, gender and economic justice; reproductive and sexual health, rights and justice; and bringing healing justice to social change work. Her technical expertise extends across workshop design and facilitation using somatics and participatory methodologies, leadership coaching, public policy advocacy, organizational development and evaluation, partnership and coalition advising, and qualitative research and writing.

Kari created and facilitates the organizing project Finding Freedom: White Women Taking on Our Own White Supremacy, an experiential, somatics-based workshop series that guides white women through an examination of the intersection of white womanhood and white supremacy and trains them to show up constructively for multiracial, people of color-led organizing. She is a board member of Showing Up for Racial Justice, a national organization dedicated to undermining white support for white supremacy and to helping build a racially just society, as part of a multiracial movement.

Prior to becoming a consultant, Kari advised on policy advocacy for women’s and girls’ access to safe abortion care for five years at Ipas, a global abortion access organization. In that role, she created and oversaw programs and conducted in-country research to improve the conditions for abortion law reform in Malawi, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Kari also represented Ipas at the United Nations and led the organization’s thinking on building effective coalitions and partnerships, in particular collaboration with nontraditional partners. 

Early in her career, Kari worked for a year in Harare, Zimbabwe, with Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe, where she conducted a national campaign to improve LGBTQ access to primary and mental health care, designed and facilitated a series of cross-racial and cross-class dialogues, and partnered with South African organizations on LGBTQ health and human rights initiatives. 

Kari has a Masters in Public Policy with highest honors from Duke University, with a concentration in global women’s health policy.