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 9 creatives, care workers, liberatory educators, transformative justice practitioners, and an alumni community of over 3000 people. We are now a worker coop with 3 other member owners: Brianna, Mara, and rj with 3 others currently on the journey to co-ownership: Gayatri, Thanh, and Kai.
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.
✨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:
ART + MERCH
Explore what's new in the shop!
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.
.png)
.png)
Friday, October 24th 2025
What does it take to be free together? And, what is the role of the facilitator / educator in supporting that freedom?
Join the Spring Up Collective and peer facilitators in learning the 5 core principles in practicing liberatory facilitation.
The daylong retreat is great for anyone who facilitates learning experiences, whether they are teachers, trainers, researchers, 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, 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.
Friday, December 5th 2025
Please note that we require at least two participants per organization for this retreat, in order to facilitate deeper integration and implementation of concepts and practices from the retreat.
The daylong retreat is great for organizational leaders, people from operations or people and culture, or founders thinking about how to create systems in their organizations. Through an examination of the 4 quadrants of our Organizational Accountability Wheel (from systems, to culture, to adaptability) participants will leave with clear next steps to present to the rest of their team to strengthen their overall internal structures and translate their values into tangible practices.
Upcoming Live Webinars
Healing work is non-linear with ebbs and flows — you may have a breakthrough and with that may come another crack in the surface the dig deeper. How might we equip ourselves for this constant gut wrenching yet nourishing work? By creating an own ecosystem of healing. There is complexity within ecosystems, layers of nurturance, consumption, homeostasis, and diversity. We use the term ecosystem because all of these components will uphold your healing process — they inform and supplement one another.
In this webinar, prepare for the end of the year by mapping out your care ecosystem and identifying ways to share this toolkit with your pod.
How do we adapt our plans and expectations through shifting capacity over time? Murmuration is how a flock of birds move together through evolving conditions in a self-directed manner. Together, we will learn from tangible tools that our organizations can implement to track and respond to changes in capacity, grounded in disability justice, consent, and design thinking.
This is a partnership between Spring Up Collective and Sassy Facilitation, as part of our 2025 theme: the Year of the Coop!
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.
Self-Guided Classes & Pre-Recorded Webinars
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?
Transformative Justice Mini-Class
This self-guided 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 self-guided 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.
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.
Summer 2025 Six-Week Unlearning Through Teaching: Facilitating Liberatory Education Cohort
How can we use learning as an opportunity to practice freedom together?
bluelight academy's Unlearning Through Teaching Class is an opportunity for teachers, facilitators, and leaders to learn more liberatory pedagogy and hold more engaging, dynamic, inclusive, and equitable learning spaces. This multimedia course provides videos, readings with audio recordings, coaching, and grounding practices to support you in integrating everyday liberatory education into your practice.
This course is for you if:
-
You believe that education can be a catalyst for more options and success in life, but you can tell that education isn’t working for everyone.
-
You want to experience freedom as a learner in order to create that experience in the spaces you hold and facilitate.
-
You want to facilitate spaces with diverse learners where people can be themselves, ask questions, and take risks without fear. You want to make learning spaces that are accessible to different learning styles including neurodiverse and disabled learners; inclusive of queer, trans, and nonbinary learners and LGBTQIA+ families; and welcoming to Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, and immigrant people and communities.
-
You don’t feel like teaching for the test or focusing on memorization truly helps everyone learn new information, but you are not sure how else to structure learning that will be more inclusive and effective. You want to hold engaging spaces that people remember and draw on for the rest of their lives.
-
You feel good about the content you teach, you are just unsure if how you are teaching it aligns with your core values.
-
You panic when something goes wrong in your learning space and are unsure of your role in intervening or correcting the behaviors. You want to have a respectful and grounded learning environment without depending on control, coercion, and punishment.
-
You want to move away from white supremacy culture and learn how to decolonize your thinking and your lesson plans.
-
You want to practice power with participants, rather than power over learners. You want to practice consent with young people and people with more or less power than you.
-
You want to be able to effectively navigate conflict with co-teachers / other facilitators, administrators, parents, community members, and learners.
-
You want to be sustainable as an educator and not feel constantly overworked or burnt out. You want to have better boundaries with your work, colleagues, and learners. You want to have a plan for how to care for yourself and create a nurturing environment for learners and community members.
The course begins on June 1st and completes by the end of July with continued access to the content.
Deadline to Register: May 16th, 2025
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.
Follow us on social media
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
Follow me!