Jill Shah

Details

Skills

- Certified Peer Support Specialist (CPSS), Washington State
- Active/empathetic listening — built through years of one-on-one research interviews, often around sensitive or personal subject matter
- Rapport-building with strangers, quickly and across a wide range of backgrounds
- Group facilitation and space-holding, from community workshops to sessions of generative research study on intimacy and technology
- Creating comfortable, low-judgment space for candid or vulnerable conversation
Person-centered, strengths-based communication
- Maintaining trust and confidentiality with sensitive personal disclosures
- Adapting communication style session to session, person to person
- Event/session coordination: logistics, scheduling, run-of-show, day-of troubleshooting
- Synthesizing group input and lived experience into clear, actionable takeaways
- Building and running research protocols from scratch, including a 150+ person distributed participant database during COVID-19

About

I'm a Certified Peer Support Specialist in Washington State, and most of my background before that was in human factors and UX research, years spent one-on-one with people, building trust fast and listening for what they weren't quite saying yet.

Somewhere along the way I realized the skill underneath all of it was the same: creating a space where someone feels safe enough to be honest. I've done that in research interviews, in workshops I've run for GeekGirlCon, stage managing a conference where a hundred small things could go wrong at once, and in the thesis project I built at CIID, which included a series of interviews and workshops where I asked strangers to talk openly about intimacy and technology.

Now I'm looking to do that work more directly, in peer support and facilitation roles where the listening is the point, not just a means to a deliverable.