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Sarah Boddy Norris
COMMUNITY PARAMEDICS MSW CLINICAL INTERN
Sarah Boddy Norris is learning to be a therapist. She works with Counterflow as part of her MSW practicum and is part of the counseling team.
Sarah is from San Diego, and has lived in Oregon, Palau, Corsica, New York City, and Georgia. She's been in Asheville for seven years.
Sarah pays attention to words–how they reflect and shape our experience, and how we shape them right back. She has always been into languages, and her first many adult years were in applied linguistics and language teaching. She has taught at every level, and spent about 15 years connected to the K-12 public education system, as a middle school teacher, a coach to teachers and principals, an instructional designer, and nowadays as a technical editor.
What she liked best about all that was getting to walk alongside radical and anti-racist educators figuring out together how on earth to be inside a system that replicates injustice. When those educators would say “haha wow it’s kinda like you’re my therapist,” she would always get a little thrill, enough that she decided to go ahead and see about being one for real.
After getting involved in a local mutual aid project in 2021, and then being criminalized for it (she has been dealing with charges of “felony littering” since March 2022*), the scope of what she hopes to do as a politicized mental health worker has widened. Through her connection with Counterflow, she gets to be in the middle of what she wants to be in the middle of: people using whatever power we have, together, to subvert the bad systems we are part of, whether we’ve been targeted or abandoned by those systems, are workers within them, or both. And then build what we want, together, with joy.
*Sarah and 15 other mutual aid workers were charged with “felony littering” in early 2022 in connection with an art-based protest, and all were immediately banned from all public City parks for three years despite no convictions and without due process. This group is now represented by the ACLU of North Carolina in suing the City of Asheville to change this policy, so that access to public space may not be curtailed in retaliation for political action. Learn more at parksareforeveryone.substack.com.