My approach: the short-ish version
I work at the intersection of organizing & therapy, the micro & macro, the individual & systemic, the private & public.
Leadership development brings the fields of organizing & therapy - which are often siloed by their respective practitioners - together. Using my experience as an organizer & my training as a therapist, I seek to practice organizing-informed therapy and therapy-informed organizing. I am a coach, a thought-partner, an accountability buddy, a pattern-pointer-outer, an agitator, a deep-question-asker, a mirror, an interlocutor.
Desmond Tutu teaches, "there comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.”
This means politicizing individual challenges, contextualizing and connecting their causes - and therefore, their solutions - to systems. I believe that supporting healing from injustice requires addressing injustice itself. I believe that resilience and care are required to fend off the burnout, despair, grief, and trauma that can arise from doing personally significant, high-stakes political work. I believe that organizing and taking public action can be transformational, therapeutic, a process of reclaiming dignity and agency on an individual and collective level.
The work of leadership development is incredibly meaningful - I have often described it as holy, awesome. In the organizing context, this means supporting a person to gain the skills, analysis, self-knowledge, confidence, and emotional intelligence to build power with others and act on their values and interests. Therapy can play a similar role in a person’s life, helping them to find meaning, be more intentional in their personal life, and deepen their relationships. I seek to bring wisdom, tools, and insights from both fields, to support people to improve their lives through both micro and macro means, on their own and with others.
Ultimately, leadership development is even more than its significance to individuals. With developed people come developed movements. When done at scale, we can fundamentally change who has power in our society - on a grand, systemic level. That feels revolutionary.
For more about my approach & orientation, see my writing section.