Shifting power concept and practice
Definition: Shifting power is the intentional practice of redistributing voice, authority, resources, decision-making, safety, and love toward people and communities on the margins who are most negatively impacted by decisions, systems, and structures we have been excluded from shaping.
In organizational practice: Shifting power extends beyond input and listening. It requires bringing those of us on the margins to the center of decision-making that shapes our well-being at work and in our lives.
“Marginality is much more than a site of deprivation… it is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance.”
— bell hooks, Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness
Why shifting power matters
Organizations often name equity, justice, liberation, inclusion, and belonging as values. But those values are tested in everyday organizational life and relationships: how people communicate, make decisions, share power, navigate conflict, practice accountability, repair hurt and harm, and stay connected to purpose and care for each other when the work gets hard.
Relationships are the living infrastructure of justice work. When relationships, structures, and decision-making practices are out of alignment with liberation values, organizations can reproduce the very hurt and harm we are all trying to transform.
Shifting power matters because it helps organizations move liberation values from aspiration into practice.Theory of Change
Relationships get equity and justice done.
We believe relationships are where people get lived experience practicing equity, justice, liberation, and shared power. When people practice new ways of relating, deciding, repairing, disagreeing, caring, and sharing responsibility in daily organizational life, we begin to experience what a more just and liberatory world can feel like in practice.
Organizations are one place where this practice can take root. When organizations resource the health, resilience, and repair of relationships, people develop stronger muscles for trust, truth-telling, accountability, generative conflict, intention, love, and shared decision-making. These practices can then be tested, reflected on, refined, repeated, and spread.
Over time, what people practice in relationships can become what teams expect, what organizations structure, what movements carry, and what society begins to normalize. This is how everyday practice can contribute to a more equitable, just, and liberatory society.
What Grounds Our Practice
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, learn, teach, hold conflict, notice hurt and harm, and support organizations in practicing their values under pressure. We are especially very excited about experimenting with applying Black feminist methods to organizational, structural, and practice designs.
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 and Brown Trans leadership.
Shifting Power Collaborative is grounded in a fierce and loving commitment to the leadership, wisdom, safety, creativity, and liberation of Black and Brown transgender people.
We know movements for justice are stronger when Black and Brown 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 Practice Shifting Power
We practice shifting power by designing processes where people can slow down, tell the truth, make meaning together, notice patterns, analyze power and privilege, move through conflict, make decisions, learn, and translate values into daily practice.
Our work is relational, emergent, and co-designed. We often design projects with a group of people who represent different roles, pay levels, identities, forms of power, and experiences of marginalization across the organization. This helps shift power in the design of the work itself by bringing people into shaping the process who are often closest to the impact, but farthest from formal decision-making.
We believe people inside organizations hold wisdom about what is happening and what may need to change. Our role is to bring structure, questions, tools, facilitation, analysis, and intention to help draw that wisdom out, make meaning from it, and shape a process people can trust and use. We do not arrive with pre-written solutions. We hold the process that helps people, especially those on the margins of organizational life, determine the organizational pathway forward.
We treat learning, conflict, and change as practice spaces. They are places where people can build shared language, strengthen trust, examine power and privilege, repair hurt or harm, experiment with new behaviors, and develop more equitable, just, and liberatory ways of working together.
What Collaboration Means Here
Many people call this consulting. We call ourselves collaborators.
We use the word collaborator because this work is not something we do to an organization. It is something we build with the people inside of it.
We bring facilitation, mediation, strategy, training, assessment, process design, and a practiced eye for how power is moving. Organizations bring the truth of their own context: the history, relationships, constraints, wisdom, tensions, hopes, and daily realities that no outside person can fully know.
Collaboration means we do not arrive with a pre-written answer and ask people to fit inside it. We listen, design, adjust, and make meaning with the people doing the work. We bring structure and skill to the process, but the path forward has to be shaped with the people who will live with it after we leave.
Commitments That Lead Our Work
Shifting and Sharing Power
We help organizations move power closer to the people most impacted by the decisions being made. That means going beyond input and creating clearer, more honest ways for people to shape decisions, resources, priorities, and practices.
Equity and Justice
We support organizations in examining how identity, structure, culture, history, and power shape people’s experience of the work. Equity and justice become real when we are practiced in decisions, relationships, policies, supervision, conflict, and repair.
Getting Free
We believe liberation is not only a future destination. It is something people can practice now in how we relate, tell the truth, share power, make choices, repair harm, and build conditions for dignity and self-determination.
Transparency
We value clarity because confusion often protects power at the expense of those without it. We help organizations be more honest about roles, authority, decision-making, constraints, expectations, conflict, and change so people can participate with more trust and less guessing.
Conflict Is Natural
We understand conflict as a natural part of relationship, collaboration, change, and justice work. Conflict is not bad by itself, but how we move through conflict can create hurt, harm, avoidance, punishment, or deeper disconnection. Conflict can show us where values are rubbing against practice, where power is uneven, where needs are unmet, where trust has frayed, and where something is asking for attention. When held with skill, honesty, intention, and empathy, conflict can be a place that leads to learning, repair, stronger agreements, new possibilities, and shifting and sharing power.