1:1 Coaching
This offering consists of 60-minute virtual sessions booked with one of our eight coaches who have a range of experience from organizing to somatics and improv to sex education. These sessions can be utilized for a variety of goals including, but not limited to:
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Support for a community accountability process you are facilitating/engaged with
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Practicing generative conflict skills
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Processing past or current harms
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Support in processing accountability for causing harm
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Practicing liberatory facilitation skills
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Learning more about transformative justice, consent, and centered accountability
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Somatically integrating new things you're learning
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Engaging in equitable design for your organization
We offer coaching as either a stand-alone product or a supplement to our other offerings. Students can choose to add-on private coaching sessions as a part of our bluelight academy courses. Coaching can also be added on as a support for a harm process a team is going through, or for live events to have support for participants should conflict, trauma, or emotional overwhelm arise in the course of the event. Spring Up coaches provide coaching, peer support, and resource sharing to help clients meet their personal goals. 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 infurther learning and implementation of that learning outside of the session.
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 the 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 the 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 the 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 the 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 the 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 the 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 the 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 the 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 the 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 the 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.
About the coaches
COACHING
Design Coaching
Design coaching is a practical and tools-based 90 minute session with up to 1 hour of asynchronous materials review, editing, and feedback. This is to help you accomplish a specific goal, and is offered by our collective’s co-founders on specialized topics. Stas offers sessions on instructional and program design, Leander offers sessions about organizational design for founders, and shaïna offers sessions about branding and graphic design.
Group Coaching
Group coaching is an integral part of our consulting services. These can be ongoing team relationship building and co-learning spaces, or can be limited to 3 sessions with a specific goal outcome. These coaching sessions will utilize restorative justice circles and design thinking tools to collaboratively map out your stakeholders and accountability commitments in order to strengthen your shared commitments as well as discern between interpersonal and strategic conflicts. Group coaching often supplements a training, such as our retreats or cohort classes, to support your group in implementing those learnings. A sample cadence for group coaching: In the first session we would focus on storytelling and getting to know each other. In the second session we would focus on mapping your ecosystem and stakeholders in order to build shared references and transparency around your commitments. In the third and final session we will map your systems for collaboration, decision making, and feedback as well as identify where your strengths and challenges are in implementing your values as a group. Between sessions you will have homework assignments that take about an hour to complete and must be submitted to your facilitators at least 48 hours before the next session.
Mediation
We offer mediation around interpersonal conflict in a four step process. First, we will do a free intake to determine if the conflict is a good fit for us to handle. If so, we will determine where on our sliding scale your group fits and enter a mediation agreement. Then, we will conduct a preconferencing conversation with each participant in the conflict. If both participants consent, a mediated conversation (typically 3 hours) using restorative justice practices takes place between the Spring Up facilitator and the two participants. An agreement is typically reached in that space, and then the facilitator will have a follow up conversation with each participant after 3-6 months for closure. This can be a standalone intervention, or can lead into group coaching or training to address the issues that contributed to the conflict.