When I arrived in San Luis, Colorado to participate in the Move Mountains Project, one of the first people to welcome me wholeheartedly was Kerry Justine Millen. Her smile, charm, and openness create space for deep, heartfelt conversations.

I’d brought with me everything needed to make calabacitas, a dish consisting of squash, zucchini, corn, onions, garlic, salt and pepper. Kerry offered to chop my veggies as I roasted the corn on the grill outside, and when I came back inside to begin preparations, we talked in the kitchen until calling all in for a dinner cobbled together from odds, ends, leftovers, and laughter. Two days later, she sat beneath the tree in the front yard, and I approached to ask her for an interview. Kerry grinned, and I began with my first question.

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Lindsay: So, can you describe how you got involved with Move Mountains?

Kerry: So I worked with Miguel in Philadelphia. This year we worked together at a place that serves young people transitioning out of foster care in Philadelphia. It’s a resource center, so they come for everything—food, housing resources, help with employment, education. They take classes there.

So Miguel was a coach, which is the first job I had there, which means you hang out one-on-one with a whole caseload of kids, you mentor them, and you have a really important role in their life. It’s a difficult job because, a lot of times, those kids have experienced really serious trauma in their lives. Many of them are continuing to experience trauma every single day. Many of them are homeless. So when you develop close relationships with the young people, you really begin to manage crisis with them a lot of times.

I’ve been working there quite a few years, so when Miguel came, it was truly re-energizing. It was fresh air, for me. He came in and we immediately connected. I was feeling really run down at this point. I don’t really have a lot of allies there. There are a lot of nice people, but people who don’t fundamentally think the same way that I do, which is okay, but eventually, after working there for almost five years now, things will start to come up. The ways I think about the world and the ways that I see these young people struggling with these things are very different than other people there, so the ways that I interact with [the children] are very different.

People often think that I’m—well, I’m usually joking with them, silly, just like, “Man, you’re so amazing,” and like, “let’s hug, man,” touching them, just bringing them love and respect so we can get into these real conversations about the reasons why they got to the way they are. So a lot of people there always thought that was a product of my inexperience, that I’m naive, and that I don’t really understand the way that the world works, but the thing is that in my own life I’ve experienced very much, and I do understand that in the world, there’s much I have to learn, but I do know that kindness and respect and love kept me alive.

The purpose that I have there is as an experiential educator, so I do this program mostly for new members but I do it with everybody. I’m pretty tight with pretty much every kid there. I know everyone who walks in the door because I’ll just walk up to them, and I’ll be like, “What’s up man? What’s your name? What does your name mean?” and I’ll ask them some random question, and then they come to my class. I just do silly games with them and reflective exercises and just try to get them to connect with each other.

My dream is that I’m not talking at all, right? I’ll just do some things in the beginnings, I’ll set the safe space, and then they’ll just take it and they’ll have beautiful conversations about all sorts of things.

So. I was doing this, and I felt pretty alone there, and Miguel came. We immediately connected, and he started visiting me each day in the morning, just brining some fresh energy, and we’d just talk about many of the things that we believe and what we’re working for, and what our bigger dreams are, and we realized that many of them are connected. Then we started working with young people together, collaborating.

I watched him make huge breakthroughs with his kids, and we worked together to really help out a few people. I can remember one girl particularly who was just scared. She was just experiencing tons of fear, and she was living in a really difficult place to see a young person to be in. She came to us, and she really didn’t want to be there. A lot of the time, that’ll happen. The kids are often court-ordered to come. So they are sometimes transported there. She was transported there and did not want to be there at all. So we started working together in the art room.

That’s the other cool thing about this place. We try to make it a place where people want to come. So my room is just this haven of hula hoops, and bright colors, and look, come make a collage, and paint something, or just run around—you can bring your kids in here and they can play. Another one of our coworkers, she’s an art facilitator there, and she’s got this great room with markers and everything. It’s a great place to take kids who are having a hard time.

Miguel and I, you know, very new friends, went in with this girl, and we ended up having a really important moment in her life and in our lives where we established this trust—the ways she wanted to communicate and trust him and trust me. We made eye contact across the table, and I was like, “I just know that no matter what I do, I want to be working next to you, talking to people with you.” I just knew he was my brother at that moment.

So then, one of the mornings that he came up to me, he was telling me about his poetry, and I was showing him this record I was working on, and he was so supportive of the record I put out and every step of it, the art I was working on, learning how to cut to use the stamps that I used, and he read my book of poetry before it became the final thing.

During that, he was like, “Hey. Why don’t you come out to San Luis in July and perform in this festival?” I was blown away that I would be asked to perform in a festival. I asked him what the festival was, and I started to learn more about it, and I started to do more of my own research, and I’ve been very passionate about this land and the ancient wisdom, and the stories, and the tyrannies that have existed here, and I’ve been really passionate about learning about it for a very long time, and It’s so special to be invited to get to be a part of a community like this.

I don’t think most people get asked that question and invited in that way, so I was blown away by that invitation, and I immediately said yes, and started to really thing about what that meant, and then, as we became closer as friends—I learned that Miguel was sleeping and eating and breathing Move Mountains, and we were hanging out, so we were talking about it.

The more we talked, the more I realized that there were a lot of tools I could bring. A lot of things that I could offer that I didn’t even know that I’d be able to translate—I hadn’t even thought that far ahead of myself yet. . . .

So as we talked more and more, Miguel invited me to take a bigger part in the project, and I spent the last few months—it was my life, it was everything. Just experimenting with assessments and nerding out on the stuff I love—trying to build a structure—how are we going to document this program and show it to people later?—because I knew it was going to be successful.

So then I formed a curriculum, and I’ve done that, but I’ve always done it under other people’s leadership. So it was really amazing and empowering for Miguel to say, “Hey, make this thing.” It brought together everything I care about. There’s mediation in there, there’s dance, there’s collaborative poetry, and I just made it in a couple of days because everything was due to Shirley.