Our Approach

Grounding in the Elements Liberating Change 

At Change Elemental, we fortify leaders, organizations, and networks with liberatory infrastructure, including strategy, leadership, teams, culture, and other areas of capacity that strengthen our movements and advance our vision while living it today.

Our approach embeds and embodies the essential elements of liberating change—turning aspiration into action and possibility into reality.

Advancing Liberation and Sovereignty

Liberation is a noun only in that it is a collection of verbs. Sovereignty reclaims our inherent right of self-determination. 

Sharing Leadership and Power

Nourishing the ability to flex across a spectrum of leadership approaches while growing collective power and power within.

Valuing Multiple Ways of Knowing

Embracing the many knowledge systems, wisdom traditions, and expanded forms of expertise that transformative change requires. 

Creating and Transforming in Chaos and Complexity

Adapting strategies for unpredictable environments while leading from vision with clarity. 

Practicing Inner Work

Centering our individual and collective health, healing, clarity, and wholeness so we can be and do, from and toward vision.

Cultivating Well-being and Vision

We meet this and every moment in ways that advance an interdependent, thriving future. Our partnerships are rooted in the understanding that, as movements, we need to be doing four things:

• Block: Defending and protecting people, communities, policies, and rights 
• Believe: Envisioning the future and being guided by it daily
• Build: Building liberating alternatives to systems together, within a big tent
• Be: Tending to our well-being, by connecting with our stories, bodies, source, and emotions

Whether we are designing and facilitating consulting partnerships or our Learning Labs, we support groups in cultivating well-being, relationships, and cultures of care while growing their visions. In doing so, we strengthen the connective tissue and the internal systems needed for successful “block and build” organizing and policy change.

Prefiguring the Future

Our approach bridges the inherent tensions between leading with and advancing our vision and values while grappling with and working to thrive within the systems we seek to dismantle. 

We often describe this tension as having “one foot on land, one foot on water”—adapted from Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ wisdom. At Change Elemental, our water foot leads toward the horizon with vision, and our land foot grapples with the daily constraints of lived reality. Both feet provide vital wisdom for our work.  

We partner with leaders, organizations, and networks to create the conditions for prefiguring their vision: to build the systems, structures, cultures, and ways of being that allow them to hold both feet simultaneously, creating capacity for the vision foot to lead with the land foot as a trusted partner.  

Through these approaches, we are strengthening leaders, organizations, and movement infrastructure that: 

• Reflects the future we want in the present
• Builds liberating alternatives to oppressive systems 
• Thrives in complexity and chaos rather than breaking under pressure
• Distributes power rather than concentrating it
• Integrates multiple kinds of wisdom 
• Sustains people rather than burning them out
• Builds toward a multi-racial democracy

“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 context with liberation and sovereignty at the core.”

Elissa Sloan Perry, Change Elemental Core Team Member

Photo credit: Change Elemental