Consulting Services
Belonging is where people co-create the future together.
john a. powell
Othering and Belonging Institute
Leadership and Team Development
We have found that making progress on seemingly intractable patterns of inequity have been most effective when it is the shared work of teams of leaders across an organization.
We have over 25 years of experience supporting individuals and teams to:
Examine and practice what it means to take leadership for equity given one’s identity
Develop meaningful and productive relationships across difference
Resolve conflicts among or between team-members
Listen and share an analysis of the problem they are trying to address
Set courageous and attainable goals to address an equity challenge or issue
Utilize human-centered processes and tools that foster co-ownership and mutual accountability
Achieve extraordinary results
Executive Coaching
We hold an emphatic and foundational belief in our organization: people – with necessary and appropriate support – have the capacity to solve their own problems.
Our coaching service is a one-to-one relationship designed to facilitate a leader’s professional and personal growth resulting in expanded ways to utilize existing skills and talents. Our practice is centered on Coaching for Equity which we define as the practice of listening, teaching, provoking, guiding, and supporting people to achieve mutually agreed upon objectives that interrupt historical patterns of inequity.
Our experienced coaches act as mirrors for leaders, often reflecting the gaps between a leader’s intentions and their actions.
Our approach draws on extensive experience combined with the methodologies of cognitive coaching, developmental psychology, systems thinking, organizational development, critical race theory and neuroscience.
Strategy Development and Implementation
The road to our desired future of education systems that ensure fair and equal opportunity for all children and families is not a straight line – it is a complex proposition at best. Fixing one aspect of a system often leads to unintended consequences in another.
Our unique approach to “strategic planning” supports organizational leaders to tackle complex problems and make concrete progress. We integrate the methodologies of systems thinking with design thinking by holding essential an awareness that problems and their solutions have both technical and relational dimensions.
Our design process facilitates a group’s ability to diagnose, design, develop and demonstrate an emergent solution or innovation.
We believe equity work is best done in community: learning in public, holding ourselves and each other accountable, trying new approaches and working through complex challenges collectively. Together we can reimagine and create equitable systems and structures that challenge and disrupt the status quo.
There are no ready answers or solutions to the complex and unpredictable challenges we face. Equity work requires “host” leadership – engaging multiple perspectives, learning with and from one another – rather than “hero” leadership of planning the work and working the plan. By supporting meaningful relationships with others in a network, we contribute to well-being and sustain people in their work, while supporting leaders to do the same in their partnerships with families and communities.
We facilitate and partner with networks and communities of practice both within and across systems and sectors.
Liberatory Design
Design is central to working towards equity. However, most of us work in systems that still manifest inequities that were produced – by design – at their outset (e.g. tracked systems, assimilationist curriculum, unequal resources). So we must deliberately redesign for equity – and engage in intentional design processes that support this.
In collaboration with colleagues from the K-12 Lab at Stanford’s d.school, we’ve developed an equity-centered approach to design called liberatory design. Building from the tradition of human-centered design (aka design thinking), which shifts traditional power dynamics related to decision-making and brings forth deeper innovation and agency amidst institutionalized norms and structures.
We believe design processes must create conditions for liberatory thinking and must be explicit about how oppression and power imbalances shape the design context within institutions. Design processes also represent opportunities for decision-makers to transform their own understanding of why persistent patterns of inequity exist in their context – and to transform their own relationships with those they are designing for.
Research and Analysis
Our action research and analysis provides important data that is both qualitative and quantitative to help in the collective sense-making by stakeholder before prior to designing interventions. These include:
Listening Campaigns: We conduct individual and group interviews with diverse stakeholders in order to hear and document the varied perspectives of community members. The listening campaign provides an opportunity for potentially silenced voices or muted perspectives to be authentically integrated into change efforts.
Equity Analysis: We collect, organize, and analyze student outcome and experience data to reveal specific equity issues and achievement gaps. The equity analysis will often reveal specifics about the types of achievement and experience gaps occurring. Targeted data varies according to context but often includes outcomes disaggregated by race, gender, socio-economic status, and other relevant categories.