Ashley Maier, MSW, MPA

Ashley Maier is a contributing author to Lantern Book’s Defiant Daughters: 21 Women on Art, Activism, Animals, and The Sexual Politics of Meat. She is also a co-author of the article, “Links between sisters’ sexual and dating victimization: The roles of neighborhood crime and parental controls” in the Journal of Family Psychology. Ashley writes for several other publications as well. She founded and directed Connect the Dots, a project dedicated to highlighting and increasing the capacity to address the connections between human, animal, and environmental well-being. Through the project, Ashley conceived and produced the first manuscript for a book that was published as Circles of Compassion: Essays Connecting Issues of Justice, with Dr. Will Tuttle as the editor.

Ashley completed her Master of Social Work degree at Washington University in St. Louis, with an individualized concentration on violence against women. She received her Master of Public Administration degree from University of Illinois, Springfield in 2014. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology and a Bachelor of Arts in French from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Ashley began working against gendered violence in the late 1990s as a volunteer at a local domestic violence shelter in her hometown of Belleville, Illinois. In the early 2000s, she worked at a hospital-based domestic violence program in St. Louis, Missouri, serving as an advocate and training health care providers. During that time, she also coordinated and conducted support groups at a local community-based organization for women who had experienced domestic violence, sexual assault and/or child abuse. There, she started the organization’s first writing group. Additionally, while in St. Louis, Ashley served as staff for an intensive youth anti-oppression training program.

In the mid-2000s, Ashley coordinated family violence and community health training programs in the pediatric departments of both Washington University in St. Louis and the University of California, San Diego. Ashley was awarded the University of California, San Diego’s 2008 Community Champion award for excellence in diversity and equal opportunity. She also served as psychology faculty for several years at San Diego Miramar College and was elected President of San Diego Central NOW (National Organization for Women).

In 2009, Ashley began directing the prevention program for the Oregon Attorney General’s Sexual Assault Task Force. There, she was responsible for implementing the state’s Rape Prevention and Education program and for managing and assisting grantees. While in Oregon, Ashley was elected Co-Chair for the Oregon Youth Sexual Health Partnership, the group responsible for implementing the state’s youth sexual health plan.

From 2012 to 2015, Ashley conducted national training and technical assistance on the prevention of gendered violence primarily for Prevent Connect, an online, CDC-funded community of practice and a project of the California Coalition Against Sexual Assault. She then served as a director at Magic Beans Creative, a kid-friendly creative agency in Los Angeles. She has taught psychology at Los Angeles Valley College since 2014 and taught psychology at California Lutheran University in 2018. Since then, Ashley has worked for the County of San Diego’s Office of Violence Prevention and the Oregon Health Authority, coordinating the state's Rape Prevention and Education (RPE) program.

Today, she continues to teach psychology at Los Angeles Valley College, teaches public administration at San Diego Miramar College, and is a Ph.D. student at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis.