Section 9: Practitioners Who Can Help

In this section we list a wide variety of outside practitioners you can seek support from when navigating challenges in your group. We offer a description of the types of services provided by each practitioner and list some specific groups we have worked with in the past as a starting place.

However, we hope that you will make a concerted effort to use the strategies outlined in the framework before turning outside the group for support.

Coaching for Individual

Coaches work with individuals or small teams to support their efforts to identify areas for growth, build new skills, and change their behaviors in ways that support their work.

Communications and Public Relations Consultants

Communications and public relations consultants work with teams to clarify their messaging, present their story, and manage crisis communications that may be needed when a group is dealing with major critique from inside or outside the group.

Development and Fundraising Consultants

Development and fundraising consultants can help you think through values-aligned strategies for getting the resources you need to support the work of your group.

Financial Management Consultants

Financial management consultants can help you think through systems and infrastructure you might need to manage your money, build strong accounting practices, and make plans for future growth or times of challenge.

Group Process Facilitators

Group process facilitators specialize in holding space for difficult conversations and creating an environment that allows for everyone to contribute their best thinking.

Healing Arts Practitioners

Healing Arts Practitioners include spiritual guides, curanderas, energy healers, mindfulness coaches, and others who have built skills around guiding groups and individuals through processes or rituals with the intention of clearing blockages, healing wounds, and making space for new energies.

Interpersonal Violence Counselor/Advocates

Interpersonal violence counselors and advocates work closely with survivors of violence and members of their support networks to address the emotional and physical trauma associated with interpersonal violence, to work with the survivor to develop a safety plan, and to help them explore options for engaging members of their community in that plan. These practitioners also can direct survivors of violence to other resources they may need.

Management Trainers

As organizational leaders, committee chairs or other leaders inside a group, we may need to recruit or hire people into the group, manage projects or campaigns, delegate tasks to other group members, and ensure people feel supported and have clear expectations for what they need to do. All of these are management skills. Many of us never have the opportunity to focus on developing skills as managers. Management trainers can offer you tools, skills and ways of thinking about management to strengthen your group’s cohesion and effectiveness.

The Management Center is an organization that focuses on helping people to build skills and problem solve management issues. Go to https://www.managementcenter.org.

Mediators

A mediator works to support two people who are trying to navigate conflict, misunderstanding, or a change in their relationship. A mediator will often ask to meet with each person separately before the mediation session to get a better understanding of each person’s respective needs, wants, hopes and fears for the mediation. Mediations can take place in one more session depending on the circumstances. A skilled mediator should be able to work across differences in race, ethnicity, gender, ability, sexuality or other significant differences in identity. However, for some participants, the identity of the mediator can have a strong impact on their sense of safety within the mediation.

The Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute has put together a living document with mediation resources. This document also includes a link to a guide for how to vet a mediator.

Organizational Development Consultants

Organizational development consultants support groups and organizations to build strong, values-aligned organizational cultures, structures, policies and practices in service of their missions. An organizational development consultant can help you identify the root causes of specific organizational challenges you are facing and work with you to build the skills and knowledge you need to make change. Organizational development consultants recognize that organizations can themselves be places where people feel traumatized and seek to transform organizations into places where they can thrive.

Resources for understanding organizational trauma can be found here.

Program Evaluators

Program evaluators work with an organization when group members are interested in learning about the quality and impact of their efforts to make change. Process evaluations focus on quality - how did we do the work, did we do what we set out to do, and did we do it well? Outcome evaluations look to see if we were able to make meaningful changes in the issues we care about. Program evaluators can also support you in identifying and testing your assumptions about how change happens.

Restorative Justice Practitioners

In a situation where one person has harmed another, or two people have caused harm to each other, a restorative justice practitioners work with the person who has been harmed, the person who caused harm, and the people who support them, as well as other affected community members, to create an opportunity for both parties to speak about what happened and to work with their support people to determine how to move forward in a way that holds the possibility of restoration. This approach prioritizes actions that repair harm, avoid punishment and shame, and allows the person who caused harm to make amends and remain in community.

Northwest Justice Forum has compiled a directory of restorative justice practitioners based in the Northwest region of the United States.

Social Justice Training Organizations

Social justice training organizations work with groups to build skills related to community organizing, advocacy, and campaign strategy, tactics and considerations for actions designed to apply pressure, amplify an issue or resist unjust practices. Some social justice training organizations may focus on a particular issue, while others are more general. Many social justice training organizations also work with groups to address internal issues and support individual well-being within social justice work.

A list of Social Justice Training Organizations can be found here.

Additional Resources

Check out these links for additional resources and practitioners whose work crosses many of the categories listed above:

Relational Uprising︎︎︎

Community Transformation︎︎︎

Raphah︎︎︎

Briana Herman︎︎︎

Elizabeth Clemants︎︎︎

Jugnurj︎︎︎