Presenter Bio - Butterfly B. Boire

Butterfly Blaise Boire is the Civil Rights & Title IX Coordinator at Middlebury College in VT.

Butterfly has been working in the field of violence prevention, response, community engagement, and diversity for 13 years. As a higher education professional, she considers the opportunity to sit with others and get a glimpse into their lives a privilege. Her work both on-campus and off-campus has been focused on education, prevention, and the creation of sustainable solutions to the issues of violence that we face as a community. Beginning work in non-profit focused on sexual violence crisis response, restorative justice community work, K-12 education, she then pursued a degree to become a clinical mental health counselor.

After working again in the local community and seeing the intersection of identity and experience in relation to power, privilege, and violence, Butterfly began teaching at a local college with a focus on trauma -informed responses, community engagement, cultural change, and intersectionality in relation to relationships and violence. Beginning work in Title IX in 2014, Butterfly became the first full-time Title IX Coordinator at her alma mater and transformed the experience of support and response for students, faculty, staff, and visitors by engaging trauma-informed responses, skill building, and transformative cultural change work.

While Butterfly has experienced this as challenging work that takes a cross-community approach to dismantle systems and environments that foster and support violence, she sees this as being her purpose. Personally, she is connected to many of these issues through lived experience, identity, and to her, this is important work that despite any challenges, she is committed to being in with others every single day.