Learning & Impact
Big vision requires long-term stewardship.
For over forty years, we have partnered with thousands of organizations, leaders, and networks working for love, dignity, and justice. Together, we reimagine and remake systems to ensure the well-being of all—our movements, our people, and our more-than-human kin.
Transformation in Action
We ground our work in deep experience and inquiry while harnessing risk-taking and experimentation in complex environments, testing what works, learning from mistakes, and growing alongside our clients and partners. A few of the shifts our clients report include:
Naima Yael TokunowStronger strategy that advances transformative change.
Organizations clarify direction, sharpen decision-making, and build cultures of strategic learning and adaptation—enabling grassroots leaders to advance their missions and deliver lasting change in their communities.
Leadership and governance that can meet the moment.
Individuals, teams, and boards strengthen their capacity to lead in complexity, flexing across a spectrum of leadership approaches from directive to collaborative, shared, and hierarchical. As a result, organizations are better able to navigate uncertainty and shape rapidly shifting conditions.
Finance and strategy, working in alignment.
By integrating financial clarity with strategic decision-making, our approach strengthens feasibility and sustainability, enabling partners to build resilient, values-aligned paths forward.
More democratic, effective, and values-aligned organizations.
Through deep processes focused on race, liberation, sovereignty, and interdependent liberating practice, partners are building the cultures, strategies, networks, and relationships needed to heal and repair this country’s core wounds while imagining and creating the future.
Time and again, groups return to us, a trusted partner in their efforts to evolve strategy, leadership, learning and evaluation, governance, finances, and culture to meet the moment.
To learn more about our consulting offerings, see here. For a list of our client partners, see here.
“[The project with Change Elemental] came at an important time for me to figure out my footing and how I want to lead. [Our consultant’s] ability to empathize, understand various dynamics, and push me to be my own authentic leader was so, so powerful… Both [the consultants] pushed me in ways I wasn’t thinking about. They took the pauses and breaths to explore challenges with me and dig into it.” – Consulting Client (Coaching, Interdependent Networks, and Values-Aligned Culture)
Over the last 12 years, nearly 200 leaders have participated in our Learning Labs, which strengthen capacity for liberating transformation. Alums report short and long-term impacts of these programs, including that they are better equipped with:
- Resilient, purpose-driven leadership and organizations.
Leaders align values with practice, nourish their well-being, and lead with greater clarity and effectiveness—resulting in reduced burnout, stronger staff retention, and more effective programs.
- Stronger cross-movement relationships and strategy.
Participants build relationships across issues, identities, and geographies, gaining a broader view of movement strategy and harnessing new opportunities for collaboration and impact.
Our Learning Labs continue to create growing ripples of impact over time. For example, the 2014 People’s Climate March emerged directly from connections formed in a Change Elemental Learning Lab—demonstrating how cross-movement collaboration can catalyze large-scale collective action.
To learn more about our Learning Labs, see here. And to dive deeper into the learning and impacts of two of our learning labs, check out the Network Leadership Innovation Lab and the John W. Mack Fellows Fellowship!
“This is the most complete offering on liberation, and organizational and
individual transformation I have engaged in.” – Prefiguring Futures Lab Alum