INTRODUCING INNOVATE!

Innovate! undertakes research and provides consultations, workshops, and ongoing programs to address organizational opportunities and challenges, improve awareness of organizational issues and dynamics, construct scalable processes to address conflict, enhance consensus building, enable research-based action plans, and create workplace environments rich in learning, growth, and connection.

Building cultures of ongoing learning and growth

Innovate! undertakes research and provides consultations, workshops, and ongoing programs to address organizational opportunities and challenges, improve awareness of organizational issues and dynamics, construct scalable processes to address conflict, enhance consensus building, enable research-based action plans, and create workplace environments rich in learning, growth, and connection.

Supporting cultures of democratic participation and shared leadership

How do we create environments hospitable to different identities, histories, experiences, and perspectives? How may we communicate to facilitate learning and creative collaboration? What structures do we need to ensure fairness when addressing conflict and mistreatment? In contexts of different positions of institutional authority, what processes and mechanisms enable justice and accountability?

Developing capacities to recognize and transform detrimental organizational and social dynamics

Are there organizational structures and dynamics that stifle trust, creativity, honesty, and engaged interaction? Are there issues that need attention that are taboo to acknowledge? Is fear used to govern and manage employees? Do those with administrative authority seek conformity? Are there structures that protect employees from abuses of authority?

Addressing limits and building networks of mutual aid

How does a group learn to identify limits and find support? What internal and external mechanisms and relationships need development to support the well-being of all members of the organization? What are the benefits of building ecosystems of mutual aid with other groups? How may our organizational capacity and identity be enhanced through strengthening the ecosystems in which we co-exist?

Supporting diversity and social justice throughout an organization

How do we assess our organization in relation to social justice? What are our understandings of the relations between diversity and social justice? How do we understand what constitutes success in relation to diversity and social justice? Who do we need as honest participants in determining diversity challenges, goals, plans, and strategies? How do we incorporate ongoing learning on issues of justice to integrate capacity to respond into our organizational culture?

Energizing personal and group healing through addressing ongoing effects of social oppression

How can the organization build greater capacity for collaboration and strengthen commitments to shared futures that unleash people’s creativity and facilitate their healing? What capacities exist to effectively engage the ongoing effects of social trauma and oppression in individuals and the organization? What changes may be enabled through research, education, and collaborative alliances? How may we develop a workplace culture marked by fairness, equity, collegiality, and hospitality to creativity and social difference?

Conducting Collaborative Research for Education, Advocacy, and Policy Change

We bring considerable experience and expertise in research through alliance with communities of practice. Through collaborative processes that foster participation from multiple stakeholders, we co-design strategic action plans facilitative of democratic social change. We undertake research and education on various social issues, attentive to complex intersections and assemblages. Issues include racism, sexism, heterosexism, class oppression, prisoners’ rights, disability, veterans’ support, neuro diversity, Islamophobia, indigenous cultural survival, anti-Semitism, whiteness, and climate justice. Our work maps inequities across sectors, addressing relations between technology, education, housing, the carceral system, economic policy, and political structures.