Karen Williams was born and lived most of her growing up years in a blue-collar neighbourhood in Hamilton, Ontario.  Here, she learned the importance of co-operative neighbourhood action and developed a healthy questioning attitude towards the relationships  between wealth, work, gender, power, and community. In her university years, she began to think about these questions on a broader scale and the link between her religious vision and her passion for economic justice was solidified.  This led her to pursue graduate work in community psychology, where her studies focused on learning about successful strategies that communities have used to fight poverty and to "talk back" to decisionmakers about policies and programs designed to help people harmed by violence, inadequate housng, unjust immigration laws, discriminatory education systems, and gender biased health services.  

She brings to her work a deep passion for social transformation, and a deep appreciation for the resilience and creativity of people whose lives are tangled up by an unjust distribution of wealth, harmful and discriminatory government policies and well-meaning, but disempowering solutions.

Examples of her previous work experience include: a) co-ordinating a participatory action research project that was designed to encourage women who had experienced violence to have input into the development of a curriculum for medical, nursing, social work, phsiotherapy and occupational therapy students. The women became the consultants who had the major input into deciding what students needed to learn to be helpful to women who had been abused by their opposite-sex or same-sex partner: b) directing a supportive housing program for youth which was based on an anti-oppressions model in all aspects. This meant, for instance, that residents formed a council to help design the program, and they helped create the "case notes" that were required by the ministry. In addition, they designed the anti-racist, anti-sexist and anti-homophobic guidelines to ensure that their "home" was a safe place for all youth.

In her spare time, Karen is also a New Testament biblical scholar. She has taught Introduction to New Testament, Engaging Paul on Pastoral Issues and New Testament Greek. Although this work may seem "worlds" away from community ministry, her study and teaching with the Christian biblical text is also aimed at social transformation. She deeply believes that certain interpretations of the biblical text and ways of reading the Bible are harmfully affecting the psyche of many Christians and non-Christians in the Western world --- and encourages students to get intimate enough with the text that they can "talk back" to it when needed.

Karen and her partner live in Davenport neighbourhood, and they have three children and three dogs in their household. They are members of Emmanuel Howard Park United Church.