Kris Coffield

Kris Coffield is the Executive Director of Imua Alliance, a non-profit victim service provider for survivors of human trafficking located in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He has spearheaded the organization’s restorative assistance for over 180 survivors of sexual exploitation, while working to enact public policy measures that strengthen the state’s anti-trafficking continuum of care. Kris is also the Chief of Staff for Rep. Jeanné Kapela at the Hawai’i State House of Representatives, where he is responsible for managing a public policy agenda that focuses on environmental preservation, climate resilience, economic justice, and human rights. Previously, he championed efforts to increase school funding and educational equity as a legislative affairs specialist with the Hawai’i State Teachers Association.

Kris is an independent scholar, whose academic research explores the intersection of modern political theory, critical security studies, and postcolonialism. A survivor of sexual violence, he is currently completing a poetry collection about the cultural experience of trauma and his personal healing journey. In his spare time, Kris can be found running up the mountain trails of windward O’ahu and indulging his unending craving for chai tea lattes.

As 2021-2022 Landecker Democracy Fellow, he is working to understand the digital reproduction of inequality and authoritarianism. He is hoping to develop communal interventions that respond to the antidemocratic proliferation of structural discrimination in cyberspace. Now also a Racial Equity Grantee, Kris will continue to use his Landecker project, Platforming Peace, to create an anti-racist social media toolkit to empower digital citizens to respond to online incidents of racial hatred and coordinate networked communities of care.

Updated September 2022.