Our work begins with relationship.
Shifting Power Collaborative supports social justice organizations in building the practices, relationships, and structures that help equity, justice, and liberation move from stated values into everyday organizational life.
We listen for what is happening beneath the surface: where power is held, where trust has frayed, where people are stuck, where values and practices are out of alignment, and where new possibilities are trying to emerge.
Our work is relational, emergent, and co-designed. We help organizations make meaning of what they are experiencing, then design containers that support people in moving with more care, clarity, accountability, and shared power.
Our practice is rooted in liberation traditions.
Our work is shaped by Black feminist methods, critical race theory, decolonial analysis, Pro-Black practice, disability justice, transformative justice, racial justice, gender justice, popular education, and the wisdom of movement traditions.
These frameworks shape how we listen, facilitate, design, analyze, teach, hold conflict, notice hurt and harm, and support organizations in practicing their values under pressure.
We honor the knowledge carried by people and communities most impacted by histories of marginalization. That wisdom is not supplemental to the work. It is essential to liberation.
We are fiercely committed to Black Trans leadership.
Shifting Power Collaborative is grounded in a fierce and loving commitment to the leadership, wisdom, safety, creativity, and liberation of Black transgender people.
We know movements for justice are stronger when Black trans people are centered as leaders, strategists, culture-builders, facilitators, designers, and visionaries. This commitment shapes how we understand power, whose wisdom is trusted, whose pain is believed, whose leadership is resourced, and whose flourishing becomes part of the measure of organizational integrity.
How We Design and Hold Process
We are organic practitioners of designing and holding process.
We bring structure, questions, tools, facilitation, analysis, and care to help people make meaning together. We design processes that help groups slow down, tell the truth, notice patterns, practice new skills, make decisions, repair hurt and harm, and determine their path forward.
“Organic” matters to us. It means we work responsively, with attention to what is alive in the room, what is emerging in the system, and what people have capacity to hold. We bring plans, but we do not treat plans as more important than people.
Our work often includes:
listening sessions, interviews, surveys, and organizational assessments
facilitated conversations, retreats, and decision-making spaces
learning experiences and practice groups
mediation, conflict coaching, and repair processes
sensemaking sessions and strategy conversations
support translating values into agreements, structures, and daily practices
How We Approach Learning, Conflict, and Change
Learning is practice, not performance.
Our learning experiences are shaped by popular education, political education, adult learning, Black feminist methods, and experiential practice. We believe people learn best when they can connect ideas to their own experiences, try on new practices, reflect with others, and apply learning to the real conditions they are navigating.
We design learning spaces that invite participation, reflection, embodiment, story, analysis, skill-building, and action. Sometimes that looks like a workshop. Sometimes it looks like a learning series, a practice group, a retreat, a conversation, or a process where learning happens through the work itself.
Conflict is information, energy, and possibility.
We approach conflict as a place where values, power, needs, histories, and relationships are speaking. When held with care and skill, conflict can reveal what needs attention, where power is unevenly held, what agreements need to be strengthened, what hurt or harm needs repair, and what new practices are ready to emerge.
Our conflict and repair work may include mediation, conflict coaching, preparation conversations, repair processes, facilitated dialogue, accountability practice, and support building healthier feedback and conflict norms.
Change needs structure, relationship, and repetition.
We are interested in change people can actually practice. That may include clearer agreements, stronger facilitation, more equitable supervision, people-centered change processes, better decision-making process, role clarity, repair practices, and shared ways of working.
We help organizations move from insight into practice by creating spaces for experimentation, sensemaking, reflection, adjustment, and renewed action.
What Collaboration Means Here
Many people call this consulting. We call ourselves collaborators.
We use the word collaborator because it better reflects our approach to the work.
We bring facilitation, mediation, strategy, training, assessment, and practice-building support. Organizations bring lived context, wisdom, constraints, histories, hopes, relationships, and the knowledge of what they are trying to build. Together, we co-create conditions for people to move with more honesty, care, courage, and shared responsibility.
Collaboration means we show up with skill, experience, structure, and analysis to the benefit of a shared goal. It means we understand transformation as something built with and by people.
Our Guiding Belief
We believe relationships get equity and justice done.
Relationships are the living infrastructure of justice work.
They shape how people communicate, make decisions, share power, navigate conflict, practice accountability, repair hurt and harm, and stay connected to purpose when the work gets hard.
Because of this, we believe organizations must invest in the practices, structures, and processes that help relationships thrive — and help move relationships out of disrepair toward something more generative, accountable, and resilient. Our work centers people and resources us all to embrace our full humanity, because equity, justice, and liberation are not only strategies or outcomes. They are ways of being in relationship.
Our commitments
Shifting and Sharing power
We help organizations build practices that move power closer to the people most impacted by decisions they do not have the power to make.
Equity and justice
We support organizations in examining how power, privilege, identity, structure, and culture shape the way people experience work.
Care and accountability
We believe care and accountability belong together. Care without accountability can avoid harm. Accountability without care can reproduce it.
Conflict and repair
We understand conflict as information. When held generatively, conflict can reveal what needs attention, structural problems, power-imbalances, what has been avoided, healing opportunities, and what new practices are needed. We understand that conflict speaks to opportunity for transformation and sometimes for shifting power.
Practical transformation
We are interested in change people can actually practice: clearer agreements, stronger facilitation, more equitable supervision, more people centered change management, better decision-making, repair processes, and shared ways of working.