Our cooperative is owned and staffed by a gender-expansive and racially diverse team of Black, Asian, queer, and trans facilitators. We provide workshops, group processes, and mediation services rooted in anti-oppressive values. Among us, we have over 50 years of facilitation, training, and organizing experience and have worked with a wide variety of organizations, including nonprofits, worker cooperatives, collectives, base-building orgs, farms, schools, spiritual communities, and coalitions.
We have supported numerous groups through change and conflict, with services ranging from tailored one-time trainings to multi-year organizational change and accompaniment processes. We bring a diverse set of backgrounds and work experiences, including organizing, non-profit work, teaching, worker-ownership, mediation, and peer counseling. We are presently based in New York, Philadelphia, Northern California, and the North Shore of Massachusetts, and we work with organizations across the country.
MEET OUR TEAM
ANANDI SOMASUNDARAM
Anandi (pronounced: ah-nun-thee) is a Brooklyn-based queer femme, caste- and class-privileged South Asian American facilitator, healer and organizer committed to individual and collective liberation. Anandi’s experiences organizing in non-hierarchical formations deepened Anandi’s interest in supporting other groups and movements to create values-aligned, sustainable structures that can expand their capacity for transformation. Anandi has spent almost the last decade engaged in social justice movements at a grassroots level, through popular education, space holding, and dance. Anandi approaches facilitation and consulting work with warmth, somatics/mindfulness, humor and a love of process design. At present, much of Anandi’s work resides at the intersections of racial justice, economic justice, and healing justice. Previously Anandi worked in health insurance technology spaces, designing and managing population health programs. Any pronouns are good with Anandi.
ANNA KRIST
Anna Krist (they/them) is a queer, mixed-race Asian American facilitator and artist who supports individuals and groups in building sustainable, equitable movements for collective liberation. They first came to facilitation as a student while leading peer health education classes in high schools. They have since spent years working with a range of nonprofits, collectives, and service providers, gaining insight into the many ways in which organizations can thrive and struggle. As a facilitator, Anna brings a keen sense of clarity and humor to guide groups through learning and decision-making. Before working as a full-time consultant, Anna spent almost a decade working in the non-profit sector, including roles at the Center for Justice Innovation, where they developed programs that help people avoid criminal prosecution, and at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, where they supported state and federal litigation for the expansion of reproductive healthcare access.
DWIGHT DUNSTON
Dwight Dunston (he/him) is a West Philly-based facilitator, hip-hop artist, educator, and activist who has brought his creativity, care, and compassion to homes, schools, community centers, retirement homes, festivals, and stadiums all over the country and internationally. Dwight loves people but not always their patterns, and is committed to uprooting the habits in himself that keep him disconnected from others and his vision for a more healed world. From a place of unapologetic hopefulness combined with 10+ years of training, schooling, and facilitation, he supports individuals and groups to learn, grow, and connect, feeling and healing through. Dwight is a Level 2 Certified Kingian Nonviolence Trainer, a certified SEED Mediation Trainer, extensively trained in Dr. Howard Stevenson’s practices on Racial Literacy, and has additional training in a number of other modalities that support him to think about healing and wholeness in individuals and ecosystems.
JANINE KO
Janine was raised by a community of Hong Kong pro-democracy activists that shaped their earliest understanding of community organizing, the need for transnational anti-imperialist solidarity, and the power of aunties. They cut their teeth as a young organizer doing tenant and union organizing in NYC, and have found political homes in reproductive justice and abolitionist mental health spaces since. They landed in facilitation via the solidarity economy, as a former worker-owner at Palante Technology Cooperative, where they came to love and obsess over the inner workings of democratic and non-hierarchical organizations–in addition to fixing people’s computers! They continue to do technology, operations, and digital security work in addition to facilitation, and also just finished their fourth season growing vegetables and flowers on the North Shore of Massachusetts.
SARA YUKIMOTO-SALTMAN
Sara Yukimoto-Saltman (she/they) is a queer, mixed-race, Asian-American, Nisei Japanese and Anti-Zionist Jewish facilitator, educator, and artist who supports individuals and groups building towards just and liberatory futures. Sara’s childhood born and raised with class privilege as an Asian settler in Honolulu, Hawai’i, on unceded Kānaka Maoli land, fortified her lifelong commitment to dismantling systems of white supremacy. Sara first cut her teeth as a student organizer in St. Paul, Minnesota, rallying around the retention of adjunct faculty and staff of color. Since then, Sara has spent the last decade engaged in political education work in various settings including grassroots collectives, non-profits, early childhood centers, and schools. Most recently, Sara was a founding member of a high school Ethnic Studies department, developing and implementing a literary curriculum centering QTBIPOC authors. Sara is also a graphic-recorder and utilizes artistic recordings as a tool for consciousness building.
CONTACT US
We’d love to chat about how we can work together!