Our Approach

Change Elemental partners across sectors to disrupt and transform systems of inequity and create powerful vehicles for justice. Combining wisdom and experimentation, experience and reflection, we join with our clients and partners to imagine and co-create transformative approaches to change that include necessary shifts in what we do, how we do it, and who we are while we are doing it. Our approach is rooted in our values, guiding principles, and the elements of a thriving justice ecosystem.

The Principles that Guide Our Co-creation

• Through deep and authentic partnerships with each other, our clients, and our partners, we co-create the models, processes, and ways of communicating and working that align with our collective values and position our efforts for lasting impact.
• We name difficult and core issues. We uncover the roots of problems and foster a climate of partnership in which tough questions can be confronted, worked through, and resolved in ways that create lasting power.
• We hold equity at the core of our efforts to advance transformative and systemic change. We partner to center issues of race, equity, power, and privilege in our work, navigate human dynamics, and build cultures where people can address harm and trauma.
• We build capacity to adapt in complex environments. We understand that the future is unknown and unpredictable. We help build capacity to adapt to the larger context while charting clear pathways tethered by strategic guideposts.
• We encourage a broader and more inclusive understanding of knowing and knowledge—one that values experience, art and ancestral knowledge, as well as more rationalist approaches often over-privileged by today’s dominant culture.  

Learning, adaptation, evolution, and alignment enable us to meet our clients where they are and partner to shift the field. We draw on our decades of experience to build on what works, experiment anew, and continuously evolve our approach. Through experimentation, reflection, and learning in partnership with others, we spark new practices and ways of being with our clients and throughout the social sector.

Elements of Deep Change

Change Elemental galvanizes movements by freeing, combining, and catalyzing the necessary elements of deep change. Whether working as consultants, convening spaces for experimentation and learning, or collaborating on projects with our peers, our approach centers on deepening the interconnected practices of the key elements of transformative change.

Advancing Deep Equity

We center deep equity in all of our work, and hold it as a set of continuous practices necessary for people and the planet to experience love, dignity, and justice. These practices include recognizing the impact of our identities on our individual and collective experiences, addressing healing, as well as acting to transform institutions and systems. It is not a destination.

Cultivating Leaderful Ecosystems

We grow leadership across multiple levels, with the understanding that leadership is the capacity to align values and actions across groups of people or communities so that organizations and networks can more fluidly and effectively respond to, and influence, shifting conditions over time.

Embedding Multiple Ways of Knowing

We work with our partners to engage multiple perspectives by drawing on cultural, artistic, rational, and other forms of wisdom in order to define both problems and solutions, enabling us to craft the expansive, generative, and transformational approaches needed to advance equitable and systemic change.

Influencing Complex Systems of Change

We support changemakers in understanding and influencing the complex systems within which we all work. By catalyzing new ways of thinking and being together, we help changemakers get to the heart of—and ultimately transform—the multifaceted and interdependent problems they want to solve while holding equity at the center.

Centering Inner Work

We take the time with each other, and with our clients and partners, to focus on what is in our hearts and to attend to our bodies as well as our minds, because it is critical for being in healthy and sustainable relationship with each other, enabling us to free new power and possibilities for a world of love, dignity, and justice.

“On their own, these elements are essential components of advancing transformative justice. However, the real power comes from approaches that draw on the interconnectedness and interdependence of these elements. When intentionally engaged together, they comprise a liberating context with deep equity at the core.”

Elissa Sloan Perry, Change Elemental Core Team Member

Photo credit: Change Elemental