Micki Semler

Background

About Micki Semler

I am currently an independent consultant as part of the Sonder Collective - a network of independent specialists and designers with a shared purpose of co-creating meaningful and impactful change with communities in low resource contexts. My professional background is in clinical counseling with youth and families who have been impacted by the complex consequences of poverty, social marginalization and the United States’ criminal justice system. I have worked as a Case Manager, Program Social Worker, and Family Therapist in New York nonprofits that are dedicated to providing alternative options to incarceration, including education, community-driven advocacy, and clinical support. The experiences that I have had, working directly with families in their homes and community spaces, have strengthened my ability to understand interpersonal, familial and community-specific experiences, and how they are situated in the larger ecosystems that surround us. While living in Nairobi for two years, I translated my understanding of how to approach these interactional dynamics into design research, primarily centered around initiating behavior-change and designing in consideration of the complex factors that influence decision-making in low-resource settings. I am deeply interested in understanding the specific factors and attributes that contribute to personal resiliency, and finding ways to harness these attributes in order to build stronger communities.