malachowski, katrina anne

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Outside the studio, I work and volunteer in community health. I'm the Community Health Education Team Coordinator at Portland Street Medicine, where I develop and teach health education alongside clinicians, volunteers and people with lived experience.

I also host a weekly space with Street Leaves at the Lymphedema Lounge, where we encourage people to come in, sit down and put their feet up, quite literally. Elevating swollen feet is helpful, but the space matters too. Many of the people who come to the Lounge spend a lot of their lives being asked to move along, leave, or explain why they're somewhere. Here, we ask them to stay and use the space to practice the kind of regular self-care that a chronic condition like edema requires.

We aren't sitting around giving homeless people pedicures. We build trust through shared experience and help people care for their own bodies in ways that are realistic and manageable. Sometimes that means finding a place where you can actually get your feet above your heart for a few hours. Sometimes it's getting into the habit of taking off your shoes and looking carefully at your feet every few days. The goal is for people to have the knowledge, tools, space and support to care for themselves.

That may seem far removed from a calligraphy class, but I find myself drawn to the same kind of work in both places. I like creating welcoming spaces and bringing together people of different ages, backgrounds and experiences who might not otherwise find themselves in the same room.

I'm particularly fond of intergenerational friendships, and calligraphy is very good at creating them. Someone who picked up their first pen six months ago can sit beside someone who has been lettering for fifty years, and pretty soon they're comparing nibs, talking about paper and learning from each other.

The same thing interests me in community health. A clinician, a volunteer and someone whose expertise comes from lived experience may approach the same question very differently. People don't need the same education, vocabulary, age or experience to have something useful to offer one another.

That's what I try to encourage at Scribe Time and in my classes as well. People come for calligraphy, but they also lend tools, recommend books, compare techniques and share what they know. I provide some structure and resources and try to make it easy to participate without worrying about whether you're too new or don't know enough to belong.