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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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GET STARTED

ART + MERCH

Explore what's new in the shop!
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Register for spring 2025 webinars, retreats, and courses!

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.

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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.

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?

Access free resources

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.

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.

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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.” 

Upcoming Webinars

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How do cooperatively-owned businesses work? What is their role in moving us toward more liberatory futures? In this free webinar, Spring Up member-owners will reflect on the processes and practices that facilitate cooperative ownership of our collective. Live webinar on Friday, 1/17/25, 5:00-6:30pm EST/4:00-5:30pm CST/3:00-4:30pm MST/2:00-3:30pm PST. A captioned recording will be made available on this platform after the live webinar session.

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How do love and artmaking fuel our liberatory practices? How can artmaking be a pathway toward forging relationships based on consent, equity, accountability, and transformation? This webinar explores approaches and practices that mobilize art as a tool for liberation. Live webinar on Friday, 2/14/25, 5:00-6:30pm EST/4:00-5:30pm CST/3:00-4:30pm MST/2:00-3:30pm PST. A captioned recording will be made available on this platform after the live webinar session.

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This webinar focuses on dissolving the implicit binaries in survivor support. We encounter many of these without knowing in our work with survivors, and many of them are applicable to restorative and transformative justice. There are many binaries we will approach and explore across this session, and the larger summit - they include breaking down the binary between professional and community member - breaking down the binary between survivor and victim - breaking down binaries between survivor and offender - and breaking down the binaries between being a survivor advocate and a restorative practitioner. In dissolving these binaries we will recover the space that exists for collaboration and mutual understanding to help us work creatively towards liberation together. Live webinar on 3/14/25 from 5:00-6:30pm EST/4:00-5:30pm CST/3:00-4:30pm MST/2:00-3:30pm PST. A captioned recording will be available after the live webinar.

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This webinar focuses on dissolving the implicit binaries in survivor support. We encounter many of these without knowing in our work with survivors, and many of them are applicable to restorative and transformative justice. There are many binaries we will approach and explore across this session, and the larger summit - they include breaking down the binary between professional and community member - breaking down the binary between survivor and victim - breaking down binaries between survivor and offender - and breaking down the binaries between being a survivor advocate and a restorative practitioner. In dissolving these binaries we will recover the space that exists for collaboration and mutual understanding to help us work creatively towards liberation together. Live webinar on 3/14/25 from 5:00-6:30pm EST/4:00-5:30pm CST/3:00-4:30pm MST/2:00-3:30pm PST. A captioned recording will be available after the live webinar.

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.

Daylong Virtual Retreats
Spend a Friday Learning New Tools and Connecting with Peers

Harm is pervasive in communities and institutions, how an organization responds to the harm is its accountability in action. This 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.

Friday, January 31st 2025

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This retreat explores invisible labor like the mental load, emotional labor, and reproductive labor; how those contribute to inequitable distribution of labor and burn out; and the ways parenthood impacts inequitable pay and opportunity. Within this time we learn about social movements and strategies to address this inequity, what larger patterns this fits into within the economy, and how these trends show up specifically in “pink collar fields,” like nonprofits and education. Finally we discuss boundaries and strategies to shift these norms and patterns in our lives and work together. 

Friday, February 28th 2025

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What skills do we each need to learn in order to make a conflict generative force in our lives? How can conflict prompt us to learn more about ourselves, other people, and how the world works? The 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.

Friday, March 21st 2025 

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bluelight academy's Transformative Justice retreat is an overview of core Transformative Justice roots and practices. Together we will review where this practice comes from, as well as the steps facilitate a community accountability process.

Friday, April 4th 2025

Spring 2025 Six-Week Community Care + Accountability Cohort

How can we move from a society that normalizes injustice and harm into a culture of consent, healing, and accountability? 
bluelight academy's flagship Community Care + Accountability course is an overview of core Transformative Justice practices, references, and skills. This multimedia course now with live discussion spaces provides videos, readings with audio recordings, coaching, and grounding practices to support you in integrating everyday Transformative Justice into your life.

This course is for you if: 

  • You see conflict and violence in your communities, families, workplaces, and relationships and want the skills and strategies to intervene without escalating

  • You believe that violence can be addressed in community without depending on the police or prisons, but are not quite sure of how to get there

  • You can be self critical and/or perfectionistic and want to abolish your “inner cop”

  • People open up to you about their traumas or interpersonal issues and you want more skills to be meaningfully supportive

  • You have been struggling with burnout, or feeling overextended in your life - particularly because of the emotional labor you provide at home, at work, and/or in your family and friend groups

  • You tend to be drawn into everyone’s conflicts and dramas and want clearer strategies to provide support while maintaining boundaries

  • You sometimes (or often) feel overwhelmed by the violence in the world, and want strategies to rebuild a sense of hope in humanity and our collective futures

  •  You want to support survivors and/or those who have committed harm but are worried about compounding the harm instead of helping


The course begins on February 10th with access to multiple live discussion spaces! Now with unlimited access to the content (the content never expires).

Deadline to Register: January 31, 2025

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FOR GROUPS & ORGANIZATIONS