Training + Facilitation

Consider our trainings to empower your team for the distribution of power.

We believe we are in twin-seismic shifts impacting communication - the demographic shift and the digital revolution - institution building MUST be conscious of these effects and all of our tools factor these shifts into our work. We believe a lot of workplace and community friction is driven by our current lack of skills for managing power, trade-offs, conflict, bias (anti-Blackness, misogyny, and ableism) across multicultural communities.

This session will help shed light on why multicultural (as defined by multiracial, multigender, multi-ability, multi-generational, multi-sexuality, etc) institution building is so hard. We will discuss the internet's role in accelerating that pain, what it means for the future of multicultural democracy, and the skills that will be deeply necessary in a world where multicultural institution building will be a baseline necessity to fight the rise of white supremacist fascism. This session is particularly concerned with how power works and what it means to cease, share, and deploy power in a world that punishes people of color, especially Black people, for having/using any power.

Prep: 30 min.
Length: 1.5 hour

Power and Multicultural Institution Building 101
A presentation and Q&A based session:

Strategic Prioritization and Sacrifice
facilitated session:

While we understand strategic prioritization to some extent, we often do not understand how strategic sacrifices go hand in hand. We don’t have a language for articulating those sacrifices and what it means to metabolize the grief of those sacrifices. This session works to support leaders in gaining a framework for both. We connect how you go from making the sacrifices you are comfortable with to the sacrifices that further your aspirations through strategy.

Prep: 30 min./ 1 hour prep call Length: 2 hours

The cultural core
facilitated session: 

Learning the way that social and reputational capital travels in your organization, what messages you and your team are communicating to each other about what is “acceptable”, and what it means to look at resources and risk to ground organization and individual challenges.

Prep: 30 min./ 1 hour prep call Length: 2 hours

Many of our organizations struggle with decision making. The popular frameworks for decision making of the day often tackle the challenge of executing a decision and clear roles for that. This training works on how you get to a decision in the first place. Identifying latent decisions is a competency and often the people at the senior management level have honed going from watching to acting. This training teaches teams how to mark the four stages of hard decision making, how to communicate around those stages so decisions don’t take your teams by surprise, and cultivate the ability to make and communicate tradeoffs with a lens on power.

Prep: 30 min./ 1 hour prep call, (team survey and results distribution before session)
Length: 3.5 hours

The anatomy
of and communicating a hard decision
facilitated session: 

Humans tend to circle through three different relationships to power - trophy, spatula, and enemy. In multicultural organizations trophy and enemy have been ways we learned to manage power to survive really brutal labor environments. This session helps teams analyze the costs and benefits of each, the behaviors associated with each relationship, and how we can move from relating to power in these ways incidentally/reactively to being intentional and strategic in our relationship to power.

Prep: 30 min./ 1 hour prep call Length: 1.5 hours

Relationship to power
facilitated session: 

There are no greater differences across cultures and people than their relationship to conflict. Conflict avoidance manifests itself as easily in dominance strategies that keep people in fear from unearthing conflict as it does with people deeply afraid of engaging in negotiating conflict. This session encourages a strategic relationship with friction and positions conflict as an opportunity for more deeply understanding beliefs, strategies, and systems dysfunctions. We will learn and reflect on the frameworks together and then develop a conflict charter as a team to establish the norms of healthy conflict you want to use together. 

Prep: 30 min./ 1 hour prep call Length: 2 hours

The conflict quad
facilitated session: 

Homogenous teams have relied on very similar relationships and experiences of power to manage their organization. In multi-racial teams the variety of different relationships are an important and winning differentiator. In order to be able to benefit from that differentiator, teams need to understand when things slow down because decisions would impact several verticals. And as opposed to more homogenous teams, where the first person to that gap wins the power - multi-cultural teams with intentional cultures often go out of their way to ensure they aren’t usurping power from each other. This session helps teams identify what kinds of decisions require bridge owners. Push senior leaders to make calls about who those bridge owners need to be. And establish expectations teams should have of bridge owners in considering the impact of decisions across all of those subject to their outcomes.

Prep: 30 min./ 1 hour prep call Length: 2.5 hours

Bridge Ownership
facilitated session: 

Anti-Blackness is an American institution. We are often unaware of the many ways in which we have ingested anti-Black sentiment or behaviors. This session gives language to anti-Black behaviors and how they manifest themselves not just in white people, but also in people of color. We do an overview of how those behaviors play out, where you may be able to recognize your own complicity in manifesting them, what it means to truly support Black leaders and leadership and why our own recognition and rejection of these practices is critical to doing justice infused work.

Prep: 30 min./ 1 hour prep call Length: 2 hours

Anti-Blackness for non-Black leaders
facilitated session: 

This session tackles some of the most pernicious and common manifestations of misogyny and asks us to reflect on our own relationships to these behaviors.  We do an overview of how those behaviors play out, where you may be able to recognize your own complicity in manifesting them, what it means to truly support women leaders and leadership and why our own recognition and rejection of these practices is critical to doing justice infused work. This session ties these behaviors to an American logic that assumes women should be accountable for care work, in its many manifestations, how that logic may inadvertently permeate systems.

Prep: 30 min./ 1 hour prep call Length: 2 hours

Internalized Misogyny and Public Expectations of Emotional Labor

A presentation and reflection session: 

Beliefs and Values for Founders/CEO’s
facilitated session: 

People come to the table in mission oriented organizations for a variety of reasons, that is why it is deeply important to articulate a founder and/CEO’s beliefs about the role their particular institution lives into. It is important that our teams know the beliefs they are signing onto, even more important for them to be able to make a decision about whether or not those beliefs are close enough to their own to participate fully in an institution. This work helps leaders understand the difference between their own personal beliefs and living through them and working through an institution and its own particular approach.

Prep: 30 min./ 1 hour prep call Length: 2 hours

Beliefs and Values for Teams
facilitated session: 

How do you develop your own and your team members values so that you/they are able to distinguish between acting as an organization actor and out of your/their own preferences? How do you make decisions about retention and departure based on what you learn about yourself during your tenure in an organization? This session asks participants to create their own north star to gain clarity on the tradeoffs they make to participate in community. In this session we will process and reflect about what it means to avoid codependency with an institution and make choices that honor your beliefs and priorities.

Prep: 30 min./ 1 hour prep call Length: 2 hours

Architect and Build

If the world hands you a faulty logic that depends on risk disproportionately falling on the most vulnerable - build a new logic over and over until you have unearthed something new.