Wairarapa’s locally owned community newspaper
Wednesday, May 29, 2024
I N S I D E: LO C A L G E N E A LO G Y S O C I E T Y B R A N C H W R A P P I N G U P P3
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Christie Johnson is the Wairarapa Women’s Centre’s new executive director. INSET: The Wairarapa Women’s Centre aims to create a safe space for women. PHOTOS/SUPPLIED
The Wairarapa Women’s Centre’s new executive director has big plans – and big energy to boot. Writer, academic and community activist Christie Johnson joined the centre’s leadership team earlier this year, having spent two years on the board, and is rolling up her sleeves to “see that the Women’s Centre is a place that is thriving”. “I’m just so passionate about the great opportunities,” Johnson said. What’s more, she has the support of “a wonderful board” and centre coordinator Geraldine Durrant, who kept the organisation running throughout the covid pandemic. “It’s giving me a bit more confidence – that they believe in me,” she said. “And it’s a strength to have all these nurturing, wise, experienced women supporting me.” Johnson’s journey to Wairarapa is intercontinental
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in scale. She was born in The Bronx, New York, to an African American father and Filipina mother, and can trace her heritage to an African woman who arrived at a slave port and whose name is lost to time. Her great-grandfather was born in Alabama before the abolition of slavery, and both her paternal grandparents were born into sharecropping – “before making the perilous journey off the plantation to the city”, Johnson said. Johnson’s uncle was the first Black person to get a PhD in political science at Columbia University – though he wasn’t allowed to board with other students because of Jim Crow laws which enforced racial segregation. Her father, born in 1932, enlisted in the United States’ first desegregated military, and served as a musician for the troops in the Korean War. “After graduating university, he moved north to New York City, became a social worker and later the supervisor of a homeless shelter. I
grew up seeing my father’s dedication to the most vulnerable residents of the neighbourhood.” Johnson herself graduated Magna cum laude from Howard University in Washington DC – a historically Black research institution founded in 1867 – with Bachelor’s degrees in science and English literature, before securing a Masters degree in public health and epidemiology from Yale. She is currently studying for her doctorate, exploring ways to improve non-traditional stakeholder involvement in decision-making. Johnson’s studies have taken her to Capitol Hill, Harlem, Berlin, Tanzania, and The Philippines, where she worked on an array of projects – such as housing solutions for people with HIV/AIDS and perinatal education. With a background of this depth and diversity, it’s little surprise Johnson takes an inquiry-based approach to
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