Webinars
We kick off each term with a free webinar, followed by 3-5 more sessions on Fridays through the term. Our Webinars are low-cost community gathering spaces where we practice skills together and dig deep into core concepts. These are discounted or free for our Patreon members and retainer clients. The topics that we choose for these webinars are often representative of the growing edge of our work, resulting in highly generative discussions. Below are our upcoming webinars & you can access our archive of all previous webinars available on bluelight.academy
We also present private webinars! If you are interested and would like to request our collective members to participate in a panel or serve as a speaker for an event, please reach out to us with the event logistics.
Spring Up is committed to offering new free resources every year (like this webinar!), as well as scholarships and sliding scale pricing for bluelight academy programming. How is that possible? This webinar exists to answer that question, and share our model for balancing accessibility and sustainability as a worker cooperative. This workshop is part of our 2025 theme: The Year of the Cooperative! We hope this model and skill sharing can support other cooperatives and grassroots formations in strategizing around pricing for their services, especially during this trying economic moment. This webinar complements our pre-existing webinars: Coops: Nonbinary Strategies in Capitalism (free!), Care Labor (free!), and Meeting the Moment: Adaptive Organizational Strategy for 2025 + Beyond.
How can we practice power with, rather than power over and power under when it comes to evaluation? How can we cut down on gossip and build constructive spaces for feedback? How can we balance being adaptive to various access needs and emerging personal crisis while having honest conversations about follow through and consequences? This webinar shares tools for real and values driven workplace accountability at all scales, from daily feedback norms to formal annual evaluations. Together we will bridge practices from sociocracy, or dynamic governance, with the philosophies of design thinking, disability justice, and transformative justice to adapt pre-existing systems and implement new norms that make accountability more explicit and achievable for teams of various sizes and structures.
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!
WEBINARS & RETREATS
Daylong Virtual Retreats
Our public retreats take some of our most requested content from our work with groups and organizations, and make them available to a broader audience. Upon completing a one-day retreat, participants will leave with both theoretical frameworks and concrete resources to support their work within their community. You can book any of our retreat topics for your private org or group.
On access: these retreats are virtual, offered in English with closed captions. All of our daylong retreats take place on Fridays from 8:30am-2:30pm PST / 9:30am-3:30pm MST / 11:30am - 5:30pm EST with an hour break included. Written and captioned video materials to prepare will be shared in advance. Upon registration, participants will fill out a survey to share access needs. If we cannot meet those needs, we will reach out and offer a refund and alternate options.
This summer, we are offering retreats on Practicing Cooperation: Power + Consent in Decision Making, Liberatory Facilitation: Holding Space to be Free Together, Solidarity Strategies: Equitable Multi-Racial Collaboration, and Harm Systems Design: Non-Punitive Approaches from Organizing to HR. Daylong retreats are the perfect way to devote space and time to your learning and growth. All retreats come with a 1:1 coaching session with a Spring Up consultant as well as access to retreat materials on our bluelight academy platform.
Friday, September 26th 2025
What skills do we each need to learn in order to make conflict a generative force in our lives? How can conflict prompt us to learn more about ourselves, other people, and how the world works?
Join the Spring Up Collective and peer practitioners in learning the 5 core steps to conflict analysis through a case study.
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.
This if for you if:
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You are afraid of conflict because it seems to be associated with things going wrong, getting distracted from the core work, or people losing trust in one another
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You have felt stuck in conflict where you and the other person (or people) don’t seem to be able to translate to one another or work past your differences
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You have had a hard time digesting and integrating critical feedback
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You have been told that you are too confrontational or direct
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You have been told or noticed that you are conflict avoidant
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You have seen how race, gender, disability, and class shape how someone is perceived in conflict as “too emotional,” “angry,” or “scattered”
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You tend to be pulled into other people’s dramas, or people tend to open up to you about their issues and you want better skills to support them
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You can feel like you are powerless or have no options to address a situation at work, in your family, or in life in general
Friday, October 17th 2025
How can we develop the de-escalation skills to engage with our collective power to reduce harm across different sociopolitical contexts?
Join the Spring Up Collective and peer practitioners in a session designed to inspire critical thinking and share tangible practices on de-escalation as a transformative justice practice.
The daylong retreat is great for community organizers, community-based safety or security collectives, care workers, affinity groups, neighborhood collectives, and people who want to deepen their understanding and approach to de-escalation as a practice that can look many different ways.
This if for you if:
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You want to feel more confident in your skills to respond when people around you are being targeted
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Your group or community has been challenged in your harm response system. You have been told that your organization or people within it have harmed folks in the community, their colleagues, or program participants.
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People around you are becoming more aware of the need to safety-plan together
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People on your team or community are burnt out and overwhelmed from carrying a disproportionate amount of labor around care work but don’t know how to ask for collective participation
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Your team/community is seeking to develop skills in community safety
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You find that how you understand “de-escalation” is quite different from your community members from different cultural backgrounds
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You want to think about harm response beyond legal liability and HR
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.
This if for you if:
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You want to experience a liberatory space as a participant
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You have struggled to make virtual meetings or training spaces feel relational, engaging, fun and experiential
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You want to make your spaces more trauma informed / responsive
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You have felt frozen or anxious when something goes wrong while you are facilitating
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You have seen participants call each other or you out or say harmful things, and were unsure of how to respond
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.
This if for you if:
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You have been told that your organization or people within it have harmed folks in the community, their colleagues, or program participants
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The system designed to respond to a harm you've experienced did not comprehensively meet your needs
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Your organization keeps being pulled into controversies and conflicts in community and you are unsure how to set boundaries around what is your place to address
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You have heard about transformative justice and are curious how those philosophies and principles could be applied in your organization
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You want to think about accountability beyond task completion and deadlines
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You want to think about harm response beyond legal liability and HR
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People on your team are burnt out and overwhelmed
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Your team or community have experienced “incidents,” “DEI breaches,” microaggressions, anonymous social media accounts, or public call outs
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Feedback on your team tends to be either only positive or quite harsh
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Your organization's values conflict with your HR protocols
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.
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 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.
Private Webinars & Retreats
Interested in booking a retreat or webinar for your group?