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✨NEW! The Spring Up Market✨
The Spring Up Market is a yearly capsule collection highlighting the works of creatives in our community through an exclusive collaboration with Spring Up. Drawing inspiration from our four pillars: Imagine (air), Support (water), Create (fire), Build (earth). This summer collection features body scubs, body butters, herbal teas, crystal jewelry, and botanical perfumes. Shop the limited edition products & bundles here:
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.
Our current classes are:
Transformative Justice
(Sliding Scale)
Our Transformative Justice Class is an opportunity for folks to learn more about everyday transformative justice tools, the roots of this philosophy & praxis, and build community around abolitionist, consensual, and liberatory ways of being.
Resilience + Revitalization
(Free)
Resilience + Revitalization is an invitation to imagine and create an abolitionist vision of tomorrow. We invite you to deepen your relationships to what it can mean to be accountable to your needs, desires, and healing.
Consent, Gender, Power
(Sliding Scale)
Our Consent, Gender, Power class is an opportunity for community educators, advocates, care providers, and people impacted by gender based violence to explore the roots of violence and frameworks of prevention and response.
GET STARTED
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.
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.
About our coaches
Mara (they/them)
Mara is a mixed queer artist and community organizer living in the occupied Tongva lands of Los Angeles. They focus on healing justice for survivors, pleasure activism, land rematriation, DIY mental health, decolonial facilitation, and mutual aid efforts beyond borders. Coaching style: Integrating transformative justice practices in your daily life or in your organization, strengthening capacity for change and conflict, navigating accountability and more.
About our coaches
Brianna (she/her)
Brianna is a grad student and social worker based in unceded indigenous land known as Chicago. She lives with her wonderful partner and two hilarious hounds named Maurice and Blaise. She is passionate about care work, prison abolition, and puppies. In her free time, she likes to hike, stretch, nap, and read. Coaching style: Supportive and facilitative; you can expect many questions and opportunities for feeling/ reflection/ embodied observation.
About our coaches
Gayatri (pr: Gah-yuh-tree) / Gaya (they/them/theirs)
Gaya is a dancer, organizer, bodyworker, and facilitator based on the contemporary and ancestral Anishinaabe homelands. Their work centers the remembrance and accessibility of our first medicines- love and water. Coaching style: my approach to coaching is inspired by an abolitionist org in minneapolis (repformn.org) that teaches folks to ‘love each other to the next step’. my hope is that coaching sessions feel like drinking a cup of tea- healing, transformative, a moment that is safe and strong to hold a pause.
About our coaches
Amanda (they/them)
Amanda is continually learning how to nurture generative conflict, and deepen their own understanding of consent-based change-work. They endeavor to live life with integrity, kindness, and maximal fun. Amanda lives in the Northeast with their partner and dog. Coaching style: Pragmatic and grounded. They utilize questions to surface client wisdom, and are comfortable with messy and outside the box thinking.
About our coaches
rj (he/him)
rj is a Black cisgendered father and educator who fell in love with the pursuit of liberation through education after teaching high school math and then training teachers in public schools. He lives a nomadic lifestyle (currently in Maryland) with partner Kelli, twins Kai and Jordan, and pup Yadi. Coaching style: Facilitative and encouraging, serving as a partner in problem solving. rj specializes in coaching teachers, parents, and men who are unlearning patriarchy.
About our coaches
Thanh Mai (pr: tah-n m-eye) (they/them)
Thanh is a community health educator, organizer, plant tender, storyteller, and auntie rooted on Tovaangar (Tongva land). As a mixed, queer Indigenous person, Thanh seeks to foster new relationship models, address intergenerational trauma, and steward land-based relationships with communities across disaporas. Coaching Style: ‘Everything we want is on the other side of fear’ - is a guiding tenant to the sessions we will have. Guided questions that explore, open, and affirm specific questions and areas of confusion, and a space to workshop how we bring abstract/theories into our lives and practices.
About our coaches
Stas (they/them)
Stas is a Queer, Nonbinary, Black-Italian based on Ute, Arapaho, and Cheyenne unceded lands in Denver, CO. In addition to being a Co-Founder of Spring Up, Stas is also our “Imaginatrix” and Lead Curriculum Designer. Coaching Style: Untangling the patterns and root causes of challenges through storytelling, power analysis, and creative practices. Creatively designing accountable organizational systems and engaging, accessible curriculum.
About our coaches
Leander (they/he)
Leander is Spring Up’s mythematician and co-founder. He lives on Ute, Arapaho, and Cheyenne unceded lands in Denver, CO. Leander is a systems thinker and conflict strategist who enjoys supporting organizations in building shared power and decentralization. They also love supporting founders in organizational design. Leander is a European-American (white) transmasculine settler committed to learning and unlearning in the service of collective liberation. Coaching Style: Deep listening, asking questions, and supporting you in getting unstuck and finding clarity and a path forward.
About our coaches
shaïna (they/them)
shaïna is a Black, Haitian, queer artist and abolitionist living on Sisspahaw and Cheraw land in Greensboro, North Carolina with their spouse & house full of fur babies. They are a creative who is passionate about the transformative power of art, design, and the imaginative process. Shaïna uses their creative practice as a tool to access liberation through healing and resistance. Coaching Style: Art forward, creative, & intentional. They look to foster a space for dreaming and imaginative thinking to use to birth meaningful design to your brand or org.
About our coaches
Juliana (they/them)
Juli (they/them) is a mixed, queer femme born amongst the sacred mountains and rivers of the Northern Andes Mountains located in so-called Colombia though currently living in their second home, Massachusett, Wampanoag, Pongapoag, Nipmuck, and Black Liberator land (so-called Boston, MA). Their practice is deeply informed by their path as a priestess in training in the Mexica moondance tradition. This manifests as a deep inclination towards the integration of spiritual practice into our political and cultural work as well as an attunement for our interconnectedness, employing emergent strategy and fractal-based frameworks for understanding healing processes. Weaving with their spiritual path is their experience inside and outside nonprofits working to develop liberatory operational and cultural practice-based models that navigate the tensions and restraints of extractive economies on our bodies while experimenting with the creation of alternative, consent and sustainability based systems and ways of being.
As a coach, Juli is a root worker at heart— they are really interested in inquiry and mirroring processes that support us in tending to our roots in ways that ground is in compassion and our agency. They have a deep reverence for the roles of death, grief, conflict and composting cycles in our healing processes and work to create tender spaces where we can be witnessed in our tending of ourselves. They also bring their background and experience with body-based practices, such as yoga and weight lifting, as well as other healing modalities, such as herbalism and astrology as optional tools that can be accessed to support the movement of energy in our sessions.
About our coaches
Kai (they/them)
Kai is an educator, care laborer, and transformative justice practitioner who believes in the power of relationship building to move towards a liberatory future. Kai began their journey in restorative and transformative justice work in 2012 through the Family of Woodstock’s community accountability board. They have over a decade of experience providing social justice-informed education and accountability support. Through their work, Kai aims to offer people skills and tools to advocate for their self-determination. They believe that care labor is life-sustaining work in that it provides people the foundation on which to build a life that prioritizes their autonomy and a sense of connection. Kai brings the values of transformative justice into every aspect of their work — creating tangible ways to practice accountability, generative conflict, consent, and intentional communication as a life path. Kai's aim as a community care practitioner is to go at the pace of trust. As Erica R. Meiners states, “Do slow work in urgent times.”
About our coaches
Kai (they/them)
Kai (they/them) is an educator, care laborer, writer, and transformative justice practitioner who believes in the power of relationship building to move towards a liberatory future. Through their work as a social worker and sex educator, Kai aims to offer people skills and tools to advocate for their self-determination. They believe that care labor is life-sustaining work in that it provides people the foundation on which to build a life that prioritizes their autonomy and sense of connection. Kai brings the values of transformative justice into every aspect of their work — creating tangible ways to practice accountability, generative conflict, consent, and intentional communication as a life path. Kai's aim as a community care practitioner is to go at the pace of trust. As Erica R. Meiners states, “Do slow work in urgent times.”
ART + MERCH
Explore what's new in the shop!
Harm is pervasive in communities and institutions, how an organization responds to the harm is its accountability in action. The one day Harm Systems Design 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.
Friday, September 20th
The Liberatory Facilitation retreat is structured around the questions, “What does it take to be free together? And, what is the role of the facilitator / educator in supporting that freedom?” The daylong retreat is great for anyone who facilitates learning experiences, whether they are teachers, trainers, community accountability facilitators, or leaders. Through dismantling notions of what ‘should’ happen in facilitated spaces and how people ‘should’ learn, participants learn skills to lead people and spaces towards differentiation and self-directed learning
Friday, October 11th
How do we navigate power and difference equitably? What personal skills and collaborative tools can we each learn in order to practice consent with ourselves and one another? This daylong virtual retreat is great for anyone who is interested in deepening their understanding of power and skills of consent based decision making. Within the retreat, participants will examine how both formal and informal power show up in our lives and unpack the 4 core steps to consent based decision making including internal consent, decision making tools, communication skills, and feedback practices.
Friday, November 1st
WHO WE ARE
"Cultivating a culture of consent & liberty for all"
Leander (they/he), Stas (they/them), and shaïna (they/them) founded Spring Up in 2013-2014 to build a community of practice embodying consent and liberation within our relationships, creative practices, and daily lives. For 10 years, Spring Up has used fiction, art, role play, and community education to popularize the skills and frameworks necessary to be free together. We have grown into a collective of 12 creatives, care workers, liberatory educators, transformative justice practitioners, and an alumni community of over 1500 people.
Spring Up hosts liberatory learning spaces through online classes at bluelight academy of the liberatory arts, print materials and curriculum, retreats, and coaching. We are a worker coop with 9 other members on the journey to co-ownership: Mara, Brianna, Gaya, rj, Thanh, Amanda, Kai, Juli, and Natasha. Our core values are Consent, Accountability, and Transformation.
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.
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.
Zines & Workbooks
Upcoming Webinars
This webinar will share about Spring Up's analysis of the economic devaluation and inequitable distribution of care and emotional labor. As a collective of care workers we will also share more about our strategies to make this invisiblized labor visible, and why we are a worker coop committed to solidarity economy principles.
This webinar will share tangible skills and strategies to respond to harm non-punitively including de-escalation and right sized consequences to harm. This follows up on many of the concepts covered in our harm systems design curriculum, focusing on how to put your harm response structure into practice.
This webinar focuses on defining, identifying, preventing, and responding to burnout in workplace and organizing contexts. It offers concrete tools and resources focused on assessing for burnout, identifying patterns and tendencies related to diminished capacity, and establishing sustainable boundaries.
Self-Guided Classes
Transformative Justice Mini Class
This course is an introduction to the basic principles and frameworks of Transformative Justice. It will introduce you to the values of Transformative Justice, its history and roots, how you likely already practice transformative justice in your everyday life, and some strategies to apply TJ to the different relationships, communities and organizations you are part of.
Cultivate Consent Mini Class
This course is an introduction to the basic principles and frameworks of Consent. It includes 8 of our collective members going through the core content of our Cultivate Consent workbook, the first workbook we ever released, and talking about the roots of gender based violence, boundaries, harm reduction, verbal and nonverbal communication, and visions of a consent based future.
Resilience + Revitalization
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?