Air
IMAGINE:
To actualize anything, we must first imagine it.
We practice liberatory education at bluelight academy of the liberatory arts.
Water
SUPPORT:
We support ourselves and each other to survive and thrive into the future we are imagining, creating, and building together.
We practice transformative justice personally and collectively in our classes and with our Patreon community.
Fire
CREATE:
We create tools and models of possibility rooted in what we imagine.
We create zines, books, videos, art, and learning spaces rooted in our analysis of consent, gender, and power.
Earth
BUILD:
We build with communities and organizations to implement transformation and practice our shared values.
We provide equity and accountability training and consulting to mission driven organizations and collectives.
WHO WE ARE
Practicing & teaching the skills necessary to be free together.
For over 10 years, Spring Up has used fiction, art, role play, and community education to popularize the skills and frameworks necessary to be free together. Leander (they/he), Stas (they/them), and shaïna (they/them) founded Spring Up in 2013-2014 to build a community of practice embodying and living into our core values of consent, accountability, and transformation. We have since grown into a collective of 7 creatives, care workers, liberatory educators, transformative justice practitioners, and an alumni community of over 4000 people. We now operate as a 100% worker-owned Black + Queer-Led cooperative with memeber owners Brianna, rj, Mara, and Kai alongside Co-Founders Stas, Leander and shaïna.
We support individuals and grass roots formations through offering free resources, zines + workbooks, 1:1 coaching, and webinars, courses + retreats at bluelight academy of the liberatory arts. We also work to support mission driven organizations, cooperatives, and businesses in operationalizing their values into practice and realizing shared power through our Getting Free Together consulting services.
Estamos felices de proveer algunos recursos en Español y estamos continuamente traduciendo nuevo contenido. Esta página contiene los recursos y servicios que proveemos en Español al momento.
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2026 Liberatory Conflict Mediation Cohort Program
Abolition means it’s up to us to move in when conflict and harm arise.
Do people tend to turn to you when they experience conflict? Have you been mediating conflict, but are looking for more abolitionist skills and community to strengthen your approach?
bluelight academy of the liberatory arts is hosting a 60 hour certification training cohort program from January through December of 2026, bringing together budding conflict workers to learn from Spring Up and each other about how to hold spaces for conflict that invites transformation while prioritizing agency, care, accountability, and healing. Conflict mediation is political, and the reality is that most mediation training programs don’t focus on disability justice, equity, and power analysis enough. Learn from a team of queer, racially diverse, nonbinary mediators with over 25 years of experience in restorative meditation, community accountability, felony juvenile + adult diversion, and facilitating both in person and virtually.
Components: 60 hours of training
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Twelve (approximately monthly) skills building webinars including 30 minutes to debrief directly with the facilitators about how to translate the skills into practice
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Six private cohort sessions for practice and peer support
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Six 1:1 coaching sessions
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Three daylong training retreats throughout the year
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Two role plays of mediations + dozens of case studies and real world scenarios
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Opportunities to co-mediate real world conflict cases alongside Spring Up team members
Deadline to apply: January 23rd, 2026
Friday, February 13th 2025
What skills do we each need to learn in order to make conflict a generative force in our lives? How can conflict prompt us to learn more about ourselves, other people and how the world works?
This daylong retreat is great for anyone who is interested in deepening their understanding and analysis skills of conflict. Within the retreat, participants will examine fictional scenarios and engage with tools to support empathy building, understand and map power dynamics, investigate the scale of the harm, and discuss the choice points available throughout the conflict. Join the Spring Up Collective and peer practitioners in learning the 5 core steps to conflict analysis through a case study. Registration for this retreat also includes a 1:1 coaching session to help integrate your learnings after the live session.
Friday, February 27th 2025
Harm is pervasive in communities and institutions, how an organization responds to the harm is it's accountability in action.
The daylong retreat is great for organizational leaders, people from Human Resources or community accountability teams or entrepreneurs thinking about how to create systems in their endeavors. Through an examination of Organizational Accountability, what harm looks like in the participants’ context, and consideration of the legal liability requirements of organizations, participants will leave with a tangible prototype for how they will respond to harm given their unique context. Registration for this retreat also includes a group coaching session for the 2 or more registrants from the organization to make sure they have a workable system to implement moving forward.
Friday, November 14th 2025
Harm is pervasive in communities and institutions, how an organization responds to the harm is it's accountability in action.
Join the Spring Up Collective and peer practitioners in learning from our organizational accountability wheel.
The daylong retreat is great for organizational leaders, people from Human Resources or community accountability teams or entrepreneurs thinking about how to create systems in their endeavors. Through an examination of Organizational Accountability, what harm looks like in the participants’ context, and consideration of the legal liability requirements of organizations, participants will leave with examples and inspirations of how they can respond to harm given their unique context.
Upcoming Live Webinars
All webinars happen from 5-6:30pm EST/4-5:30pm CST/3-4:30pm MST/2-3:30pm PST. A captioned recording of each webinar is made available via our bluelight academy platform for registrants who are unable to attend webinars live or registrants who would like to refer back to webinar content.
Our theme at bluelight academy for 2026 is “generative conflict” - as a worker cooperative team of transformative justice practitioners, mediators, and organizational consultants we have first hand experience moving from fear or destructive conflict tendencies into creative, grounded, accessible, and safe practice to address conflict.
In this FREE webinar we will:
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unpack why conflict can feel scary,
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share our most used best practices to move toward generative conflict,
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illuminate what we have noticed as patterns in our mediation work with clients, and
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go through an overview of what to expect from our 2026 programming including our 60 hour conflict mediation training program
If you attend live, you will also get a special discount for our conflict programming this year!
Do you feel confident in your ability to name and interrupt when an agreement is violated? We find that community agreements should be paired with a right sized safety and care plan that can be drawn on as needed in moments of dysregulation and to get support beyond the people present in the space. As an abolitionist collective, we are committed to responding to safety concerns without mandatory reporting - safety + care plans are critical to following through on these commitments. In this webinar we will walk through the agreements we use in conflict mediation, and how we respond when they are violated without punishment. We will also walk through some of our favorite safety planning resources - specifically from the Creative Interventions Toolkit - as well as Spring Up’s mediation safety + care plan worksheet, with examples of how we have used it to response to safety concerns and challenging moments.
In a society that prioritizes logic and the mind over the body and embodiment, we are intentionally disconnected from our bodies’ ability to discern between what is unsafe and what is positive stress, or the discomfort of learning and growing. One of the ways we can learn the skills to discern for ourselves is by reconnecting with this body knowledge through somatics. Somatics offers us tools to be able to build the skills and practices that support us in regulating our bodies and nervous systems, such as co-regulation, grounding, meditation, and stimming. This allows us to connect with our needs, helping us to build strategies to meet them and notice when they are being violated. Part of this involves working through our internalized and embodied ableism and the ways we have been socialized to suppress our pain and discomfort in order to be productive.
People often quote that conflict avoidance is a tenet of white supremacy culture, but what does that look like in practice? And how do we interrupt these patterns without overcorrecting? In this webinar we will go through a map of 4 different flavors of conflict avoidance, from ignoring and enabling harm to jumping to conclusions and scapegoating rather than holding the complexity of a situation. Together we will discuss harm reduction as a framework for responding to conflict and harm in a way that center’s people’s agency while moving away from perfectionism and unnecessary urgency.
Self-Guided Classes & Pre-Recorded Webinars
Book a coaching session
Are you looking for more support in dealing with conflict, accountability, and boundaries in your life? Spring Up coaching is a peer-based, flexible, non-therapy offering to help you clarify your goals and build your self-care and communication skills.
Our collaborative approach to coaching is based in a non-hierarchical relationship that is solution focused — coaches recognize that clients are experts in their own lived experience. Coaching is strengths-based and culturally specific in that coaches help the client enhance their inherent strengths, skills, and resources accessible to them. Spring Up coaching has an expectation that the client is ready to engage in further learning and implementation of that learning outside of the session.
Support us on Patreon
Joining our Patreon community means you’re supporting the work of the Spring Up collective and our community-based impacts. We’ve created this space to provide access to low cost coaching, community resources, as well as a place to build a mutual aid fund for our collective. Funds from our patreon also allow us the ability to provide scholarships for bluelight academy courses & retreats as well as print our zines and fund our annual market collection where we uplift the work of makers and creatives in our community.
In 2023, we extended $11,175 in scholarships to 49 students who are formerly incarcerated, Indigenous, disabled, Black, and/or from the Global South with the support of the Life Comes From It giving circle and our 150 Patrons. This includes groups working on stopping violence against Native women and children, rebuilding community after incarceration, creating peer support resources for the Autistic community, and exploring how TJ frameworks apply to LGBTQ people in South Africa.
Zines & Workbooks
Transformative Justice Workbook
This workbook is a collection of frameworks and resources Spring Up has developed over the past decade to understand and intervene in systemic, institutional, inter group, interpersonal, and internal harm and violence. We have especially focused on gender based violence (sexual harm, intimate partner violence, relationship abuse, homophobia and transphobia) and how GBV intersects with and is compounded by other systems of violence.
Cultivate Consent Workbook
This zine is complete with key learnings/tools we determined over a period of time as most transformational for our participants in our trainings, workshops, and fellowships, including our consent toolkit with information to analyze power dynamics and coercion, practice open and ongoing communication, and utilize trauma-informed survivor response strategies in our relationships.
Liberatory Education Workbook
This workbook is created by Spring Up as a space for us to reflect on our pedagogy and tools for liberatory education as solidified in our online school platform, bluelight academy of the liberatory arts, after 10+ years of development through community, youth, and organizational education spaces. A great reference for designing liberatory learning spaces in community or in formal education settings, this workbook includes scenarios about how to put your principles into practice when it comes to disability justice, LGBTQIA inclusion, countering anti-Blackness, and more.
Resilience & Revitalization Zine
Resilience + Revitalization is an invitation to deepen our relationships with what it can mean to be accountable to our needs, desires, and healing. What and who do we draw upon for strength? How do we grow toward resiliency in a culture that forces many of us to choose constantly between immediate and long-term survival and safety? What can it mean to explore accountable, loving, and sustainable relationships to self and others? This zine explores what it can mean to engage our relationships with our bodies, minds, and spirits in ways that honor the vulnerability required to show up for ourselves and our communities.
ORGANIZATIONAL CONSULTING
Are you looking for an accountability and design partner in building a culture of shared leadership?
Spring Up’s Getting Free Together consulting services identify the root causes that make it difficult to collaborate through conflict mediation or organizational accountability audits. We provide hands-on support in getting unstuck and implementing a clear plan through group coaching. Our interactive group trainings build shared language and frameworks to get the whole team on board, and include 1:1 support for each team member to apply the learning to their day to day work.
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OUR CORE VALUES: C.A.T.
Consent
Consent is a practice to collaborate equitably across difference. When practicing consent we strive to co-design a path forward in a way that honors everyone's boundaries and balances varying needs while having explicit conversations about expectations. Consent is an embodied knowledge of what we want to attract, what we want to move away from, what we are excited about, and what we can tolerate. It is a living and breathing feeling that is constantly evolving and being influenced by our surroundings. In order to practice consent we need to be able to adapt to shifting conditions and boundaries through continuous opportunities to exchange feedback without fear of coercion, shaming or retaliation. Having agency over one’s consent is a key part of liberation. Oppressive forces in history and the present have normalized lack of consent and therefore many of us are returning to the knowledge that we have consent over our bodies, our dream space and more. At its core, consent is about self-determination, mutual negotiation, and reciprocity.
Accountability
Accountability is a politic of community care and integrity. It is about honoring our commitments and taking responsibility for the impacts that our (in)actions and ways of being have on ourselves and those we are in relationship with. As a strategy, centered-accountability offers more seats at the table for how systems are designed, how relationships are experienced, and how repair from harm can be done. Practicing accountability means seeking and listening to feedback, taking steps to address values and boundaries misalignments, and committing to ongoing reflection and dialogue to make sure our strategies address root causes rather than depend on quick fixes.
Transformation
Spring Up is a meditation on transformation. Our commitment to transformation is grounded in the belief that everyone should have the opportunities and avenues to grow; to unlearn misaligned conditioning, alchemize trauma, re-imagine our relationships, and open doors to liberated realities that were previously locked. We strive to bridge theories and abstract ideas with our lived experiences through the creation of sacred containers for conscious evolution that honors what has been, faces what is, and collaboratively manifest what is to come. A self-aware process of transformation is an act of deep listening and receptivity to sharing power with others by adapting to feedback in order to expand and layer rather than discard or start over. It is embracing process over outcome, not aiming to arrive at a “perfect” conclusion but instead being curious about a lifetime of iteration that balances adaptability with consistency through the interwoven practices of consent and accountability.
- XY’LAI
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