Raven Buckingham Aäe

I advise leaders and institutions working at the intersection of gender-based violence, public safety, courts, and democratic systems.

My work focuses on helping agencies, policymakers, media leaders, and cross-sector institutions recognize patterns of harm early, communicate about them accurately, and build responses that prevent escalation.

I am the founder of Haliruna Consulting and an appointed Commissioner on the Washington State Supreme Court's Gender & Justice Commission. My work spans strategy, policy, training, and systems design, with particular expertise in stalking, coercive control, firearms-related risk, and the institutional conditions that allow violence to persist. I bring a distinct rural democratic systems lens to this work.

I am especially interested in executive advisory, institutional strategy, and high-impact collaborations that bring expert, evidence-based thinking on gender-based violence into public leadership, culture-shaping platforms, and system reform.

I am a mother, an ultra-endurance athlete, and live in unincorporated Okanogan County.

---

The geographic locus

The rural West anchors my work. Urban institutions, staffed by people who have never spent a winter in a town of four hundred, make most of the decisions about national policy and global rural realities. My work argues that rural communities deserve their own specialized scholarship — that they are not backward cities waiting to catch up, but harbingers of what happens when democracy operates without attention or proper accountability mechanisms. The failures rural communities absorb first are the failures the country will see at scale wherever oversight and capacity thin out.

Haliruna is not a remote-work consultancy that happens to sit in a small town. The geography is the practice. The relationships are the practice. The cultural fluency it takes to move between a county sheriff's office, an attorney general, a state policy room, a national gun violence prevention foundation, a shooting range, and a kitchen table in a valley where the closest hospital is sixty miles away — that fluency is the work. No one can import it from anywhere else.

Honors and accomplishments

• Commissioner, Washington State Supreme Court Gender & Justice Commission (2025–2028)
• Led legislative advocacy for 2024 Washington State bipartisan legislation defining stalking as a public health epidemic, including a budget proviso fully funding remedial training for Okanogan County Sheriffs Office on gender-based violence
• Built the advanced DV training program at the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission
• Founder, Okanogan County School District Emergency Preparedness Subcommittee (2023)
• Led the first large-scale safe storage distribution effort in Okanogan County — more than four hundred devices placed directly into community hands
• Guest lecturer at Washington State University and speaker at the University of Washington Evans School of Public Policy & Governance
• Presented at the Conference on Crimes Against Women, the End the Violence Conference, and the Washington State Public Health Association Conference
• Certified instructor: Tactical Social Interaction, Community Resiliency Model, and Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife hunter education

Contact

I read engagement inquiries personally. raven@haliruna.com.