Approach & Services
Our Approach
As a team of multi-racial queer and trans facilitators, we take up the frameworks of Black feminism, intersectionality, and principled struggle with humility, and strive to center those most impacted by systemic oppression in our work. We orient to our work as an opportunity to disrupt and heal the patterns underlying interpersonal conflict and create lasting structural and cultural change within organizations and our movements.
We support people invested in meaningful social and economic change to build towards more just futures through political education, conflict exploration, visioning, and strategic planning.
Guiding principles
1. Build democratic practice
We believe that democratic process, shared organizational power, and collective self-governance are key elements in moving organizations towards more just and liberatory futures. We believe that process is as important as outcomes in our work, and strive to hold and execute processes that are highly participatory, rooted in shared purpose, and deeply collaborative.
2. Prioritize relationships
As facilitators who are trained peer counselors, we believe that tending to feelings and relationships are key to effective long-term equity and visioning work. We create containers to support the processing of emotions as a way to build and strengthen relationships that can sustain movements.
3. Tend to conflict
We understand avoidance, dissociation, and disruptive conflict as foundational logics of white supremacy culture within organizations. We take up the framework of principled struggle in turning towards conflict as an opportunity to deepen relationships and sharpen political analysis and strategy.
Services
Our offerings are flexible and tailored to each group’s specific needs, timeline, and resources. Many of our projects don’t fit neatly into one of these buckets, but are a blend of many.
We bring rigorous political analysis, experience building and working inside of democratic processes and formations, and skill in navigating tension and conflict to all of our projects.
Conflict Mediation
Rooted in the framework of principled struggle, we orient to conflict as an opportunity to deepen our relationships and sharpen our political analysis and strategy. Together, we can design and facilitate a mediation and exploration process to support your group in approaching conflict with curiosity and rigor, identifying the root causes of hurt and mistrust, and learning new tools for disagreeing well with one another. Our conflict work draws upon a range of mediation models, peer counseling practices, and transformative justice frameworks to create a process that meets your group’s needs.
Retreat & Meeting Facilitation
Our retreat and meeting facilitation services are tailored to a group’s needs and goals. These agendas often involve facilitating groups through challenging or complex discussions, making high-stakes decisions, and/or deepening their relationships with each other. Through an array of facilitation tools and strategies, we can design a structure and process that invites everyone to participate meaningfully and moves the group towards deeper trust, collective investment, and the goals of the retreat or meeting.
Theory of Change
A Theory of Change describes an organization’s vision for the world they want, and their particular role and approach in building towards that vision. Through a series of facilitated workshops or a retreat, we can support your group or organization in creating a Theory of Change that underlies and guides their future work. A Theory of Change not only clarifies and sharpens the work of an organization; it can also build deep investment and shared purpose across your team. Key components of this facilitated process include articulating collective values and beliefs, crafting a future vision, and clarifying a specific niche with the movement ecosystem.
Values-led Strategic Planning
Our strategic planning processes support groups in choosing priorities and creating work plans that align with their core values. Together, we will identify key areas where gaps exist between values and practice and/or central questions that a group keeps circling around but never has the time or capacity to answer. From this list, we will collectively choose strategic priorities to focus on and build out a plan to bring the group in deeper alignment with their values. Through this process, we will build the muscle of democratic decision-making and structuring organizations towards the world we imagine possible.
Internal Systems Design
When a group’s internal workings and practices don’t always align with their core values, it can create ripe conditions for unintended tension, conflict, and confusion. Many organizations want to shift, but don’t have models for how to do things differently. We can collaborate with your team to vision and design new systems and structures that are rooted in your group’s values, including feedback practices, conflict norms, accountability structures, decision-making and governance processes, and more.
CONTACT US
We’d love to chat about how we can work together!