Coaching with Mara
Mara (they/them) 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 and mutual aid efforts beyond borders. Mara believes that embodied and restorative practices guide people towards unlocking their own power, fueling collective dreaming, and pushing us towards freedom. In their free time, they celebrates music on their dublab radio show, Discoteca 3ala Mars.
1:1 coaching with me is a deep dive on how you can integrate transformative justice practices in your daily life or in your organization, how to strengthen capacity for change and conflict, navigating accountability and more. My background is decolonial facilitation and healing justice. We will look at tools for long-term embodied work and for navigating conflict, creating roadmaps of how to realistically integrate change. Joy is centered always as we dream up plans. We can utilize our time together as a vessel for personal reflection or strategic planning. Usually sessions begin with a grounding practice, reflection, activity/skill build and closing.
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 in further learning and implementation of that learning outside of the session. The coach will not be more invested in the clients’ development than the client themself.
Please note that while many of our coaches are trained in skills of community accountability, mediation, therapy, etc. and will draw on tools from these practices, the coaches do not explicitly facilitate those experiences. While coaches do not engage in crisis response, our commitment to abolition means that in the case of imminent threat of serious injury to oneself or someone else, the client’s safety and self-care plan will be prioritized over external reporting. This might look like the coach contacting the client’s bluelight academy “course buddy” for additional support. We will never call 911 or other reporting mechanisms unless a client explicitly requests that we do. Additionally, Spring Up will provide a referral to Project LETS — a peer support community organization that supports folks without depending on state-sanctioned systems that trap folks in the medical/prison-industrial complex.
1:1 Support
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:
- Support for a community accountability process you are facilitating/engaged with
- Practicing generative conflict skills
- Processing past or current harms
- Support in processing accountability for causing harm
- Practicing liberatory facilitation skills
- Learning more about transformative justice, consent, and centered accountability
- Somatically integrating new things you're learning
- Engaging in equitable design for your organization
Prior to 1:1 sessions, clients will be provided with our confidentiality statement as well as our safety and care plan for their use. 24-48 hours following a session, clients will be provided with an email offering them resources on the topics covered in the session.