Introduction to Liberatory Design
3-hour Virtual Workshop
Upcoming Workshops
Tuesday, December 3, 2024
9:30am-4:00pm PST
Tuesday, January 28, 2025
9:30am-12:30pm PST
About The Workshop
We are all living in challenging times that our past experience and training has not sufficiently prepared us for. Too often, well intentioned equity efforts do not succeed—and even produce unintended consequences. This can lead to frustration, hopelessness and cynicism. This workshop offers an introduction to our Liberatory Design approach.
Liberatory Design is an approach to addressing equity challenges and change efforts in complex systems. It is a process and practice to:
Create designs that help interrupt inequity and increase opportunity for those most impacted by oppression
Transform power by shifting the relationships between those who hold power to design and those impacted by these designs
Generate critical learning and increased agency for those involved in the design work
At the core of Liberatory Design are a set of beliefs: racism and inequity have been designed into systems and thus can be designed out of systems; designing for equity requires the meaningful participation of those impacted by inequity; and equity-driven designs require equity and complexity informed processes.
The Liberatory Design approach and card deck was originally created as part of a collaboration between the National Equity Project (Victor Cary and Tom Malarkey) and the Stanford d.school's K12 Lab (Tania Anaissie, David Clifford, and Susie Wise) in 2016. Our approach to Liberatory Design is grounded in our Leading for Equity Framework and integrates human-centered design (aka design thinking) with complex systems theory and deep equity practice.
What Participants Are Saying
”Great introduction to Liberatory Design. It feels richer and deeper than other design processes you may be familiar with and the community of practitioners is so wonderfully diverse and inspiring. Jump in!”
– Holly Morris, CEO/Founder, Global Voice Community
"I came away from this workshop with a better understanding of the complexities involved in equity work, a wealth of strategies - both taught and modeled - to immediately employ, and a greater feeling of inspiration for this work, mostly coming from the incredible community that joined together for this workshop."
– Amelia Lombard, Educator/Learning & Development professional
“I highly recommend this workshop for anyone involved in creating, designing, and/or evaluating programs, initiatives, or systems. This workshop has provided me with a model and the words necessary to reflect on my personal experiences and biases and to ensure that any design work I engage in is a collaborative, reflective, and empathetic process. This workshop has allowed me to start thinking about how to operationalize transformational work and the shifting of power to underrepresented communities.”
– Kassi Longoria, Principal Consultant, MAYA Consulting
Frequently Asked Questions
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We are excited to offer Center for Equity Leadership Virtual Workshops. Our workshops are 3-hour interactive sessions where participants will engage with a single focused topic, connect with other equity leaders around the world, and gain new tools to add to their equity practice. Workshops are bite-sized nuggets of knowledge, frameworks and tools that are delivered in a highly engaging way.
This workshop will be delivered in a live, 3-hour interactive learning session conducted online in Zoom. Attend the live session with facilitators and fellow participants and gain new knowledge and skills to bring back to your own context. Participants receive electronic versions of all resources and tools.
We are intensely focused on humanizing our virtual spaces. We focus on interactivity and connection (these workshops are not webinars), frequent screen and body breaks, and attending to learning, practice, and healing in community with people around the world.
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Anyone curious about the Liberatory Design approach, especially the Liberatory Design Mindsets who is not yet ready or able to attend our 6-week course
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We provide an advance draft of our slide deck 24 hours before the session and enable live transcription and closed caption during the live Zoom session. Our sessions are recorded (absent any technical difficulties) and can be accessed for up to 30 days after the course concludes.
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Because our trainings include attention to building a learning community and interaction with other folks in small groups, we encourage full participation for the duration of the training. However, we understand that our homes and workspaces are commingling in this time. We hope participants can fully engage during sessions, but support participants to attend to their own unique needs.
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Workshop fee: $200/registration
You will receive a password-protected Zoom link and any other pre-reads and resources prior to the event via email.
Registration by credit card is our preferred method. We are a small (but mighty) organization and processing and collecting check payments for our events has a high administrative impact.
Click here for information on paying by check or purchase order.
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Information about cancellations and registration transfers can be viewed here.
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Reach out to us at events@nationalequityproject.org
“If I am not in the world simply to adapt to it, but rather transform it, and if it is not possible to change the world without a certain dream or vision for it, I must make use of every possibility there is not only to speak about my utopia, but also to engage in practices consistent with it.”
— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Indignation