Ways to Work Together
When Giving and Receiving Feedback Feels Like a Trick: Systems for Self-Observation and Self-Governance
Giving and receiving feedback seems like a natural part of the territory in a workplace or classroom, but it can sometimes feel like a trick--and, if it isn't a waste of time work, it can be at the expense of a positive team culture . How do we fix this? We look to living systems to see how living feedback loops are designed. Learn how to set up a feedback system as a living system, customized for your specific scenario, whether it's in a classroom, team, school, or org. Leave this keynote or workshop with a clearer understanding of why feedback usually doesn't work as intended and strategies for doing it differently.
When Burnout (Extraction) is Evident: Use Living Systems Patterns to Re-Organize and Re-energize Your Team, Operating Within Your Locus of Control
Patterns exist everywhere we look in natural systems. By focusing on three distinct patterns, and what's in your locus of control as a leader, we can start to design work flows that operate with more ease and even create energy, instead of zap it. These patterns can be applied to all sorts of energy flows: everything from meeting formats to parent calls to community programming and lesson planning. Leave this workshop feeling more connected to the natural world while providing strategies and consideration for application.
The Edge Effect: Creating More Vibrancy in Your Learning or Workspace by Leveraging Challenges and Diversity Based on an Understanding of Ecosystems
We know that growth is all about challenge and the cycles of those challenges. Living systems are based on cycles, too: life, new iterations, death, life again. In an ecosystem, if a challenge is too simple or too difficult, the living thing will be thrown out of balance, and the results of the imbalance usually become concrete and visible. There is a sweet spot to being with challenges, and living systems actually have a lot to say about where you can find those sweet spots and why it matters. This keynote/workshop topic will help you understand where you might be selling yourself, your students, or your staff short when it comes to challenges. We'll use examples and metaphors from the living world to better understand how to concretely create more challenges in our work spaces, and you'll leave with a clearer understanding of why and when to push others and yourself, too.
Unsubscribing to the Algorithm: Permission to Be Your Most Creative Self at Work
Sure, there are benefits to standardization, but the thing is, they're often short-term benefits, especially when it comes to elements of the human workplace. This keynote or workshop will give you the opportunity to identify the standardization around you that's causing stagnation and sacrificing longer-term benefits, remember who you are, and create space for you to do your unique work in this world. We'll discuss this concretely with strategies and practices you'll be able to use immediately. If you work with students, we can apply these learnings to your work in helping them be their most creative selves, too.
Budget for all virtual keynotes: $1,500
Budget for In-Person Keynotes: Contact us
Topics
Perfect for professional development: All keynotes are customized for your specific needs, can be modified to run between 25-45 minutes, come with a custom PDF for your audience to continue the thinking after the keynote, and are delivered virtually. Please contact us to discuss in-person keynotes separately.
Ready to engage your staff or community?
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Ways to Work Together
Building A Regenerative Foundation for Your Educational Project
You're interested in kicking off a new project: founding a school, creating an educational business, organizing a homeschool co-op, or something else. You have the confidence and understanding to build your project on a regenerative foundation. It's not as easy as it seems in a world where extractive, industrial paradigms show up deeply in our structures.
Sarah will help you move forward with a connection-based approach and energizing regenerative principles you'll be excited to apply to your new foundation.
Budget: 2-10k
Revise Your Institution's Core Values, Vision, Mission, and Next Steps.
Do not remodel on top of a faulty foundation! We'll work together to discuss principles based in regeneration, processes for determining your core values within your work and your ecosystem, then we'll put together your vision and mission statements that represent your role in a new, regenerative world. Importantly, we'll make sure this new orientation is supported with structures, so your mission statement doesn't just go in a folder to die and is reflected on as a nice thought exercise for everyone. We'll plan these structures with relationships in mind.
While we often work with schools, we have worked with nonprofits and businesses in the past here, too.
Budget: 4-15k
Creative Leadership Coaching
You are new to your identity as a leader or maybe just new to your specific leadership role, and you're wanting to find your voice as a leader for a regenerative future, instead of aligning to an outdated hierarchical, power-over structure. Sarah can help you find not only who you are as a leader, but how to use your voice to clearly communicate to folks in your ecosystem, becoming the leader who is making huge inroads for a more regenerative future.
Budget: $750-10k
Let's get started!
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Ways to Work Together
Sometimes you need deliverables.
We'd love to help!
Keynotes
Coaching
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In-Person Workshops
Curriculum Creation
Perhaps you would like to add a class, club, professional development series to your school that has to do with identifying where we have industrial, extractive practices and mindsets, and seeing how we can replace them with regenerative practices, and you need one that is 100% customized to your exact audience, place, and needs.
Budget: varies widely based on context. Reach out
Curriculum Enhancement/Connection
You've got no space for teaching anything new, but you're interested in someone looking at what you're currently teaching and developing practices and principles that weeds out extractive mindsets and weaves in regenerative thinking. We're not adding an "extra thing". We're enhancing what's already there.
Budget: varies widely based on context. Reach out
Train-the-Trainer Workshops
What is the problem you are trying to solve or the change you're trying to make widely, and how can we do it through a regenerative lens? We have hundreds of hours of experience creating and training on train-the-trainer models that solve your problems using regenerative principles. We can create engaging trainings that relate regenerative practices to a problem/solution in your work, and then supportively share and train individuals to internalize these workshops to be more widely shared within your network.
Budget: varies widely based on context. Reach out
Document Audits
Given that we're soaked in an extractive, industrial culture, the default creation point of most of our documentation, procedures, and more are from a place of mechanization. We'll take a look at important documents, policies, and/or norms at your school, organization, business, institution, and provide suggestions to change those documents but more importantly: use those changes as a foundation for instruction in making changes in your institution.
Budget: STARTS AT $500 (1 brief, foundational-to-your-org document + 45-minute consultation call)
Ways to Work Together
On-Site Regenerative Design Sprint Workshops
This multi-day, immersive workshop in design-thinking with a regenerative frame will bring your team to shared visions and solutions for larger pivots, re-sets, and more to avoid remodeling on top of a faulty foundation. This is about the idea you want to bring to life as an organization, a problem you want to solve, a foundation you want to reimagine.
Our methodology centers on your team's participation as you work together to design solutions based in regenerative principles and collaborative processes. Save time in the long run, ensure every voice in your team or school is heard, and learn useful bite-sized exercises you can use in your own classrooms or meetings as well as the larger design process you can replicate to design solutions for the next problem. You'll walk away with a process, next steps you've already begun, and an energized team.
Let's get started!
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In-Person Workshops
We offer three types of creative and immersive in-person workshops that will get your hands dirty (sometimes literally) and inspire action to bring forward ideas or solutions for a more regenerative future.
On-Site Botanical Dye Workshops
While we were teaching, we developed a love for learning how to use plants to create color on fiber, and created Drift Lab Textile Co. We soon found that the teachers in us loved teaching natural dyes, especially both for the curiosity it invokes, the connection to the living world it creates, and the sheer joy it brings. Since then, we've taught many classes to educators, specifically, about natural dyes as we find important ways to tie it back to what it means for our work as educators. We still do these workshops because we find them so powerful, and we would love to bring some color and life to a team of teachers at your school.
Add-ons:
- Use Natural Dyes In Your School: Additional workshop time to share ways and methods for incorporating natural dyes in your own school or lesson plans (even beyond art class!)
- Foraging Walk Consult: Helping you identifying plants on campus you can identify and safely forage for natural dyeing with students.
- Natural Dye Garden Planning: We'll help you find a perfect site and create a plan for a natural dye garden that works with your group.
Budget: Starts at $1000 and Varies based on # of participants, type of workshop, add-ons, & distance from cleveland, ohio.
Budget: Starts at $5k
We all want the best for our kids. But our culture has made it tough to navigate a way there. A North Star seems cluttered by a billion other stars in the sky. We can help.
Where to focus: Is it this or that high-quality curriculum? SAT scores? STEAM? SEL? DEI? Culturally Responsive Teaching? Respectful Parenting? Yoga in the classroom? Sure. But when we bucket all of those things (vital as they are or seem to be!), we're forgetting to answer the question: What is education for? What could education be for?
If you're interested in backwards planning from there with us...
You're in the right place.
"Sarah and Jess blew me away with the ridiculous quantity of research and scientific knowledge that supports every aspect of this learning framework.
They are living proof that these practices open up the energy to get shit done, as they have clearly accessed whole new levels of energy to produce this amazing workshop while also holding down careers and families. The structure, graphics, and pacing of the framework that they share make understanding the purpose of the vast number of positive practices very accessible and meaningful. The tools embedded into the workshop make it realistic to actually put these ideas into practice. Utter respect."
- meredith Charpantier, teacher
“I thought I was impacting my students on a daily basis, but Sarah taught me to raise the bar with engaging them in academic talk. GAME CHANGER in my room.
They learned to respectfully resepond to one another and our classroom transformed with considerate conversation about content. I am truly grateful for the year of coaching I had with her and the knowledge she shared with me.
- Traci Athanason
Traci Athanaso
2019 Hernando county Teacher of the year
900
approximate amount of classroom lessons around which Sarah has personally coached 1-1
100%
survey results from workshop participants who said we exceeded their expectations
3
years we've spent developing our regenerative TOLIFE! Framework for educators
approximate amount of hours of workshops and talks Sarah & Jess have lead on the topic of regenerative ed
550
What do folks have to say?
real reviews
meaning-making
"This program was a wonderful introduction into sustainable, holistic, and human models of education.
Sarah and Jess were fantastic and encouraged all thoughts, ideas, and connections we made as learners. They fostered a supportive environment with various ways to access the material."
- S.A.
creative thinking
“This program provided unique benefits to me as an autistic adult interested in helping to make education more universally accessible for all learners.
It not only helped me clarify a direction for my future work in this area, but it gave me space to engage in much needed conversations that facilitated my ongoing social-cultural-linguistic development and helped me engage in more playful and creative ways of thinking overall.
- S. W.
it's simple
"Not only was it valuable for myself, but I am now able to share this information in an easy to understand and accessible ways to my students and colleagues"
- Stephanie
come on!
open the door!
We can't wait to show you the possibilities when we remember ourselves as a part of a living system.
