The Power of Asking: Christine Winfield Turns Empathy into Action

From feeding unhoused neighbors to co-founding Comunidad de Colores, Winfield shows how one determined organizer can invite an entire community into “good trouble.”

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Christine Winfield jokes that volunteering keeps her “out of trouble”—or, as her friends put it, in good trouble. But beneath the humor is a philosophy: caring for one another is not a promise for later. It is work to be done here and now.

A humanist, organizer, and self-described rabble-rouser, Winfield has spent years turning empathy into action across Santa Fe. At Pete’s Place Interfaith Shelter, she cooked meals, recruited friends and relatives, and built a community around neighbors too often reduced to assumptions. Her secret is deceptively simple: ask. People may want to help, she says, but someone has to give them the opportunity.

Winfield’s empathy is rooted in experience. Having known poverty, housing insecurity, and assault, she recognizes how quickly one setback can push a person through society’s cracks. When asked how she keeps her heart from breaking, her answer is unguarded: she doesn’t. She lets it break a little, then keeps going.

That persistence now fuels Comunidad de Colores, the free Santa Fe clinic she co-founded with three healthcare professionals. Created for uninsured New Mexicans, the clinic plans to offer adult primary care, substance-use treatment, mental-health services, family planning, and gender-affirming care without making patients prove they are worthy of help. Its grassroots model rejects federal funding restrictions and places shared power, equity, and community needs at the center.

For Winfield, healthcare is not a commodity but a human right, alongside food and a safe place to sleep. Her work challenges the idea that doing good requires wealth, sainthood or an institution. Sometimes it begins with noticing who is being left out, refusing to look away, and sending a text: Can you bring water? Can you serve dinner? Can you help?

Anybody can, Winfield insists. The difference is that someone asks—and someone says yes.