Our Work
In our flagship program, we provide process design and facilitation support for public policy development rooted in community leadership and responsive to community priorities and needs.
We provide training for community members, community-based organizations, advocacy and philanthropic organizations, and public agencies around racial equity, collaborative governance, and other aspects of social justice.
We offer group and individual coaching support to BIPOC environmental justice leaders in nonprofit organizations and public agencies who are working to shift the practices and policies of their organizations.
Are you looking to partner in support of your community work? Reach out!
Our Frameworks
Just Transition
As defined by Climate Justice Alliance, “Just Transition is a vision-led, unifying and place-based set of principles, processes, and practices that build economic and political power to shift from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy. This means approaching production and consumption cycles holistically and waste-free. The transition itself must be just and equitable; redressing past harms and creating new relationships of power for the future through reparations. If the process of transition is not just, the outcome will never be. Just Transition describes both where we are going and how we get there.”
Collaborative Governance
(1SW’s definition) Collaborative governance is an approach to policy- and decision making models that shifts away from hierarchical, capitalist, and dominance-driven frameworks for governance, towards one where capacity and systems are designed to equitably distribute power and center community stakeholders in decision-making. Collaborative governance creates a shared analysis of root causes and is grounded in the strength and capacity of communities. It aims to create a thriving culture of participation in which communities work together to solve social, economic, and environmental challenges.
The Spectrum of Community Engagement to Ownership (Above a fragment of the document).
Developed by Rosa González of Facilitating Power, in partnership with Movement Strategy Center.
Read about case studies
Our team of arts facilitators uses art and storytelling for culture shift, engagement, and design strategy. We believe social change and liberation work require narrative change, storytelling, cultural grounding, and imagination to achieve genuine community connection and create more equitable and sustainable futures. We acknowledge that our communities hold many ways of learning and sharing knowledge, and we all thrive when unique forms of creative expression are encouraged. We believe art and culture are pathways for collective worldbuilding, for co-imagining. Art as Strategy helps us understand ourselves and our communities. Art as strategy offers us joy in the process of community collaboration. Learn more
What’s Been Forgotten: A Resurfacing Project, 2024.
35,000 Square Feet and Rising animation.
Healing Justice
Healing Justice is a political framework shaped by economic, racial, and disability justice that re-centers the role of healing inside of liberation. Healing Justice seeks to transform, intervene and respond to generational trauma and violence in our movements, communities and lives; and to regenerate our traditions of liberatory and resiliency practices that have been lost or stolen. It involves creating spaces and practices that are all-gender, all-bodied, inclusive and accessible, for practicing and receiving healing in partnership with social justice movement work and sites of political action. These spaces may offer first aid, counseling and crisis support, mediation services, massage therapy, acupuncture, energy work, herbal therapy, divination, art therapy, nutritional counseling, and yoga, among other healing practices. Healing Justice as a political strategy was first conceived by the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, is rooted in Black southern traditions of resiliency, and its definition was further adapted by Allied Media Projects.
1SW practices healing justice through a focus on liberatory leadership development. Liberatory leadership is a commitment to the divestment of colonial mindsets that benefit from our sense of powerlessness and insecurity. Liberatory leaders engage with ancestral healing practices, our connection to the land, our relationships, our work spaces, and our right to art, rest, and play, to remember ourselves as whole, dignified, and collectively resourced people. We carry out liberatory leadership with practices, systems, and structures that create ecosystems of liberation founded on Just Transition Principles.
Healing Justice as defined by Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective
Healing Justice Practice Spaces: A How-To Guide, Allied Media Projects
Liberation Leadership Pilot retreat, 2023. Photos by Tarik Bartel.