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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:

Interested in our upcoming classes?

Sign up to be the first to hear when they come out:

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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.

Liberatory Education

(Sliding Scale)

Our Liberatory Education Class is an opportunity for teachers, facilitators, and leaders to learn more liberatory pedagogy and hold more engaging, dynamic, inclusive, and equitable learning spaces.

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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

Juli (they/them)

Juli is a mixed, queer femme who walks the red road, born amongst the sacred mountains and rivers of the Northern Andes Mountains located in so-called Colombia. Juli’s path has involved serving community as an educator, facilitator, healing artist, restorative justice practitioner, certified trauma-informed yoga and meditation instructor. Coaching style: Processing and healing, listening while also asking poignant questions. Juli makes for a strong, yet compassionate accountability partner.

About our coaches

Natasha (she/her/ella)

Natasha is a fat, queer, disabled, cis-gendered, Latina, healer, and survivor working hard to de-colonize herself and connect to her Taíno and Yoruba roots. Natasha has over a decade of experience in restorative practices, transformative justice and healing justice, community organizing and advocacy, and youth development. Coaching style: Natasha seeks to inspire exploration of self and the systems we exist in, learning and unlearning ways of bbeing in the pursuit of liberation and healing by stepping into power in brave and authentic ways.