Supporting Women Impacted by Incarceration
For two decades Kate has provided compassionate, confidential emotional support and grief tending to women experiencing incarceration, volunteering in Washington’s women’s prison since 2007 using the SHANTI model.
In 2018, she founded Good Grief, a peer process group where women co-create a safe and supportive spaces to process grief, loss, and life experiences. In 2024, she launched Painting Inside Out, an expressive arts program that invites participants to explore creative self-expression for personal healing, self-care, storytelling, and processing grief and other challenging emotions. Through art, women can honor their stories, develop new coping skills, and discover creativity as a powerful tool for transformation and personal liberation.
In 2025, Kate founded the Inanna Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting individuals through grief, loss, and life transitions with confidential, nonjudgmental listening, peer support, creative arts exploration, and educational resources.
Her vision is to expand this work to support the ongoing recovery, reconnection, and restoration of women who are currently or formerly incarcerated as they rebuild their lives and reconnect with their communities.
Interested in learning more, getting involved, or supporting this work? Please reach out.
Shanti model of peer support:
• mutual respect
• positive regard
• empowerment of the client (the assumption that the client has the solutions to his or her own problems and does not need your advice or direction)
• genuineness (being oneself, authenticity)
• acceptance of differences (does not mean agreement, but acceptance based on respect)
• empathy (allowing oneself to feel with another person)
• intention to be of service
to support this work
Find us at Inanna Institute. Or you can buy Kate a Ko-fi, or join her Painting Inside Out Patreon.
Donations are tax deductible and support the work directly by helping cover costs that make this work possible: gas mileage, toll fees, art and writing supplies, and volunteer training. You can also donate other supplies like books (a prized possession), journals, and art supplies. Please contact us or donate here.
Our aim: to utilize the support, knowledge, and wisdom each person brings; to mend and strengthen relationships with ourselves and one another by creating a safe, confidential, respectful, and nonjudgmental environment to share and process; to understand our stories as they are contextualized in the larger environment and world. Acceptance and acknowledgment are major components of the approach — this pertains to being willing to listen to and be present with difficult feelings, both our own and others.
my story
I began volunteering at the Washington Corrections Center for Women in 2007, having done similar work previously at the King County Jail. This was part of a program called the Inmate Support Project, an initiative of a Seattle-based nonprofit called Shanti that initially formed in the 1980's (also in San Francisco) to support people diagnosed with HIV. Shanti's work involved training and supporting volunteers to provide confidential, non-judgmental support to people in the community who were isolated, vulnerable, stigmatized, and experiencing grief and loss. In the late 1990's this was extended to incarcerated individuals through Shanti's ISP. Seattle's Shanti dissolved in 2013 due to funding cuts by its parent nonprofit, but the inmate support work has continued through a small handful of people at WCCW, Monroe, and King County Jail. I've been the only such volunteer at WCCW since 2007. Prior to Shanti's dissolution, I helped plan and facilitate the four-day training program for potential new volunteers. I currently meet 1:1 with about 18 women each month, and seem to always have new referrals awaiting a first meeting. My primary role is as listener, being present to the difficult experiences these women are navigating. Some people I meet with for a relatively short period of time (a few months), and others I have supported over well over a decade.
Nonprofit sector experience spans most of my adult working life. For over twenty years, the people I’ve frequently interacted with professionally have been impacted by one or more, sometimes many, of the following: trauma, disability, addiction, dementia, a life-limiting illness or injury, loss, incarceration, isolation and/or stigmatization.
Incarceration is something that has touched my family.
As a visual artist, I experience the inherent usefulness and restorative power of creativity and self expression.
