I founded a non-profit, Mountain2Mountain, in 2006 to focus on women's rights projects in Afghanistan. I spent a decade working in Afghanistan and have crisscrossed the country by motorcycle, bicycle, car, helicopter, plane, skis, and hiking on my own two feet. I have experienced Afghanistan through its landscape and its people who shared their stories, homes, food, and dreams with me. My initial projects centered inside women's prisons, a women's heroin rehab center, girls' and boys' education in remote mountain villages, and the deaf community in Kabul, but my passion was with the emerging youth culture.

I worked with the newly created Afghan photojournalism center to create a pop-up traveling street art installation, Streets of Afghanistan. I supported creatives in Kabul to support the first graffiti workshop for Afghan artists with Combat Communications. I sought out the young storytellers and activists.

Underlying my work was the taboo of cycling. In 2009, I became the first person to mountain bike in Afghanistan, and I continued to use cycling as a tool to investigate the gender barrier across the country for nearly a decade. The barrier cracked open sooner than I anticipated, and I began to train and coach the first generation of women cyclists in 2013. Alongside my projects, I wrote books and brought an all-woman film crew to Afghanistan to produce a film, Afghan Cycles, that spent the next five years documenting the National Cycling Team and the first women-founded, women-led cycling team in Bamyan.

In one decade, a thriving cycling scene for women and girls developed across multiple provinces and disciplines. But that was violenting erased on August 15, 2021, when Kabul fell to the Taliban. I worked to evacuate the original and current Afghan cyclists and their family members. Over 150 Afghan women and family members evacuated and resettled safely. The whole story is complicated and involves the corruption of the sports and human rights community. Because of them, there are cyclists and human rights defenders left behind.

Today, cycling is banned, as are all sports for women in Afghanistan, along with education, most jobs outside the home, and traveling without an escort. In just a few short months, Afghanistan became the most repressive country for women and girls in the world. It is now the only country to ban sports, secondary education, and access to nature and the outdoors through the bans of walking in public gardens and entering national parks. The most recent ban in 2024 forbids women from speaking in public. Afghanistan is legalizing gender apartheid with the complicity of the international community. Afghan women are engaged in the diaspora to fight back with the help of the UK Gender Apartheid Inquiry and the UN.

My initial pull to Afghanistan in 2006 focused on investigating gender violence and women's rights and the role of international development. But my decision was bolstered by the desire to understand the truth of what was happening in a country that my country had been funding war within for nearly forty years. I wanted to lift the media, film, and news propaganda I was indoctrinated into as a US citizen to meet Afghans, see Afghanistan, and investigate alternatives to traditional international aid models. What I uncovered was horrifying in its wilful corruption and complicity in laundering money back into Western pockets.

I no longer run a non-profit. Every person evacuated and safeguarded was done so through direct mutual aid. I am still fighting to support Afghan women and amplify their stories. Most recently, with the help of lawyers at Hogan Lovells, to submit evidence with Afghan women athletes to two essential inquiries: the UK Parliament's gender apartheid inquiry and the UN's special report on gender abuse in women's sport.

I spent four years working in Afghanistan with the first generation of women cyclists from 2012-2016. My work with the Afghan National Women's Team was internationally recognized with an exhibition in the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, National Geographic Adventure, and a nomination of the national cycling team for a Nobel Peace Prize as part of an overall bid by an Italian committee to nominate the Bike as a 'Vehicle for Peace.'

When I started mountain biking in Afghanistan in 2009, I could not find Afghan women or girls riding in Afghanistan anywhere in the country. It was still a cultural taboo, and while I heard rumors and stories of Afghan women riding in the south in the 1960s, there were no physical records of it to be found because the Taliban had destroyed so much history when they controlled the country. What remains is the oral history preserved by family members, which shows that women rode bikes. The first generation of cyclists began decades later, in 2011. I started to support them in 2012.

From 2013 to 2018, I was a producer on the Let Media documentary Afghan Cycles, which documented the first generation of Afghan women to cycle for sport in multiple provinces and premiered at Toronto's Hot Docs Film Festival. My memoir, Mountain to Mountain, documented my first experiences mountain biking and investigating the gender barrier. The book's epilogue was meeting Marjan Seddiqe, the captain of the National Women's Cycling Team, a handful of young women cycling in Kabul.

Thanks to the bravery of Afghan women and girls over one decade, women's cycling grew from a handful of young women on a cycling team in Kabul to girls' teams and clubs in multiple provinces, training and racing in road cycling, mountain biking, and BMX. The sport was incredibly dangerous for women and girls and was still considered taboo by conservative Afghans at the time that Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021. Today, cycling is banned like all sports for Afghan girls. So is riding bikes, visiting public gardens and national parks, restricting freedom of movement and outdoor access for women and girls. It is part of the larger gender apartheid that prohibits women from school and work and traveling without a male escort. The fight to dismantle gender apartheid has only just begun.

The evacuation of Afghanistan's first generation of female cyclists and the current cycling teams took place with numerous partners and supporters and was financed by crowdfunding and individual donors. The total number is unknown, but through my efforts alongside partners, over 150 Afghans, mainly cyclists and their family members, along with human rights defenders and journalists, were evacuated and resettled into ten different countries. This group included all the original national team members and cycling leadership from Bamyan and Kabul that I knew, supported, and rode with from 2013-2016. While most of the day-to-day work finished in late 2022, the most recent evacuations and resettlements occurred in the summer of 2024. The work is not over. And for those safe in the diaspora, their safety has meant the collapse of their teams, their dreams, and the right-to-ride movement that they were part of.  

Endangered Activism was created in collaboration with my daughter, Devon when she was 12 years old to mentor and develop her activist passions in wildlife conservation and endangered species. We co-created this project to focus on field research storytelling, learn the best solutions in local conservation, and find creative solutions for storytelling in urban and youth communities that aren’t traditionally tied to conservation. We had the opportunity in her 7th-grade year to travel for 14 months, putting our apartment belongings into storage and diving into field research around the world. Soon, Devon was interviewing biologists, rangers, scientists, conservation leaders, and researchers in Namibia, Borneo, and Argentina about local solutions to the global problems facing extinction and climate change.

Devon’s focus on giving voice to the issue was a graphic novel and street art projects. We co-wrote the graphic novel The Rosette and brought Mariana Prieto on to illustrate. We launched the street art project #WhatWeLose with Mexican artist Diana Garcia as a collaboration and mentorship in Paris, Oxford, and Denver, Colorado.

Our journey was documented in its entirety, and we are now ready to transform our experiences into a powerful documentary. This film will not only showcase our field research but also highlight the use of street art as a unique storytelling medium. Our goal is to present the narrative through the voice of youth, inspiring them to take an active role in wildlife conservation and climate justice.

Climate justice, gender violence, extinction, Palestine, LGBTQIA+ rights, Transgender rights, gender equality, abortion rights, Black Lives Matter, and voting rights…. I have protested in the streets in multiple countries, exercising my right to assemble, my right to protest, and my freedom of speech as a stakeholder and as an ally. I believe that change comes from the ground up, from community-led movements, not from the top down. Governments only listen when the people take action.

There are many ways to organize, to protest, and to build movements. I choose to engage in several forms: through art, through my humanitarian work, through my writing, through sit-ins and demonstrations, and through protest in solidarity with the community. I believe all of these movements are intertwined; we cannot separate climate justice from Palestine from gender violence, from trans rights, voting rights from abortion rights, and from the general overall anti-war movement that focuses on decolonization. These issues are not isolated, just as we are not isolated from them as individual humans; they are part of an interconnected web of social justice struggles that require us to recognize our liberation weaves across borders and identity politics.

"No one is free until all of us are free."