Christian Matheis serves as director of monitoring, evaluation, and training development for Every Campus A Refuge, and he is faculty in Community and Justice Studies in the Department of Justice and Policy Studies at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC. In 2015 he completed his PhD in the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) at Virginia Tech with a specialization in ethics, political philosophy, and philosophy of liberation. Matheis is co-editor of Migration Policy and Practice: Interventions and Solutions (2016), editor of Transformation: Toward a People’s Democracy – Essays and Speeches by Suzanne Pharr (2021), and editor of the second edition of Pharr’s In the Time of the Right: Reflections on Liberation (2025). At ECAR, Matheis specializes in designing community-engaged research and evaluation processes that help to gather the perspectives of newcomers and members of their broader communities in order to then influence positive changes in US resettlement infrastructure.

In addition to research and evaluation efforts, Matheis also co-designs and helps to deliver small-scale and large-scale training and professional development opportunities. To support ECAR’s transformative model of creating hyperlocal resettlement campus ecosystems nationwide, Matheis applies a familiar framework found in most liberatory social movements: “by us, for us, about us,” which is the idea that those who are most impacted by social change should be the first and strongest voices guiding that change. To ground ECAR’s research, evaluation, and training Matheis applies the framework “by newcomers, for newcomers, about newcomers” as the core design principle. In addition to his regular teaching and research, Matheis provides training in areas of human relations facilitation, intergroup dialogue, grassroots direct-action organizing, and on other topics.