Building Power with Youth. Reimagining Systems.
Learn with Us
Join us to reimagine and rebuild the systems that impact young people every day. We partner with youth and adults to strengthen leadership, shift power, and design innovative, community-rooted solutions. Together, we can move from ideas to action — and from vision to transformation.
About Our Transforming Systems Trainings
We believe youth are not the leaders of tomorrow — they are leaders now. When young people with lived expertise partner authentically with adults willing to share power, real change becomes possible.
Our work advances youth-adult partnerships and youth-led systems change by building skills, confidence, and influence of youth leaders to shape the policies and systems that directly impact their lives. At the same time, we equip adults, organizations, and institutions to shift culture, share power, and reimagine systems of care.
Through immersive trainings and long-term capacity-building partnerships, we cultivate a growing ecosystem of changemakers. Across all our offerings, we use storytelling, art, case studies, imaginative play, and guided dialogue to deepen systems thinking, strengthen solutions analysis, and expand our collective ability to envision and build equitable, loving communities.
All of Our Trainings are Rooted in Our Belief That…
Youth are Experts
Young people are the experts in their own lives — and in the systems solutions that impact them.
Belonging is Co-created
Belonging grows when everyone has meaningful opportunities to contribute to and receive from their communities.
Transformation Starts within and Between Us
Healing, bridge-building, and collective learning make individual and interpersonal change possible.
Systems Can Be Reimagined
Storytelling and radical imagination help us challenge what exists and design what’s possible.
Love is Action
Love is a rigorous, courageous practice that guides how we lead, build, and change systems.
Training and Capacity Building Offerings
We offer the trainings below for youth, adults, and/or intergenerational spaces. All of our trainings can be customized to meet your goals and needs. Fill out our contact form to scope out your training with us.
Intro to Systems Change- Part 1
Intro to Systems Thinking
What is a system? From personal to interpersonal to structural: how do systems show up in our lives, and how do these systems interact with each other and impact our wellbeing? What is systems change?
Suggested: 2 hours
Intro to Systems Change- Part 2
The Anatomy of Change
What are the conditions that help create systems change? What are the roles needed? We use case studies to explore how change happens, and practice charting a path towards systems change for a topic of interest identified by the group.
Suggested: 4 hours
Policy and You
What is policy and why does it matter in your life? Using storytelling and case studies, we will learn how to read a policy, identify the main ideas, think about the reason for the policy and its potential impact, and connect the ideas to your lived expertise and knowledge.
Suggested: 2 to 4 hours
Liberatory Visioning
What is liberation? What could it look like, feel like, even taste like? Using imaginative play and guided by the worldbuilding possibilities of fantasy and science fiction, we explore what a free future could look like and practice how we can open our minds beyond the confines of our current structures and narratives.
Suggested: 2 to 4 hours
Storytelling for Change
Learn skills and practice strategic storytelling to build a narrative that you can use to inform local and state-level positive systems change. Learn how to protect your peace and only share when it feels right.
Suggested: 2 hours
Creating Communities of Healing- Part 1
Conflict in Our Everyday Lives
Using transformative justice as a foundational framework, this session will dig into what accountability looks like at a personal and interpersonal level and what it looks like to transform conflict in our everyday lives.
Suggested: 4 hours
Creating Communities of Healing- Part 2
Conflict in Communities
This session will go further and dig into what transformative justice is at a systems level and start dreamy conversations about how we build communities where harm is no longer possible.
Suggested: 4 hours
Research for Action
In this session, we will explore participatory action and community-centered research, helping to build understanding as you learn how to conduct ethical research, from ideation and design, to data collection and analysis, to working with community members to interpret results and share the resulting narrative to inform systems change. You should leave this workshop feeling confident in your newly developed skills and prepared to conduct a community-centered study.
Suggested: 4 hours
Youth-Adult Partnership Offerings
The topics below are designed to help organizations effectively and autentically engage and empower youth to participate in their decision-making structures.
Integrating Youth Voice
In this training, we’ll work with you and your team to build structures that incorporate authentic youth voice in decision-making and leadership roles within your organization. By the end of this training you will have a better idea of how to build alongside youth rather than just for youth. Together we’ll explore your team goals, create action plans, and learn activities that engage youth’s lived expertise.
Suggested: 2 to 4 hours
Engaging Youth in Policy Decisions
Learn how to build pathways for youth to engage in policy and multiple levels of systems change with decision-makers. This session will explore building youth’s capacity and readiness for strategic sharing that centers youth wellbeing first. We’ll then explore your current pathways of policy engagement and build a plan for engagement that meets youth where they’re at.
Suggested: 2 to 4 hours
Sharing Power with Youth
To build systems that work for youth, we must first understand the power and privilege we hold as adults and understand how youth experience systems of oppression. In this session we will use power mapping exercises to find access points where we can share space and power with youth in our personal and professional lives. We will consider this as we explore how we can build systems for youth that elevate their lived expertise.
Suggested: 2 to 4 hours
Engaging Youth in Community Research
Interested in learning how to build pathways within your organization for youth to engage in all stages of a research project? This session was designed to help organizations explore pathways to support organizational research goals and support youth in building skills related Youth Participatory Action Research strategies. Organizations should leave this workshop recognizing the value that youth voice can bring and feeling confident in their abilities to engage young people in community-based research.
Suggested: 2 to 4 hours
Training Highlights
Social Change Roles
Using games and storytelling, we explore the many roles it takes to create true and transformative social change. We connect the social change roles to our own strengths, hopes, and sources of joy to get curious about the roles we hold and those we want to grow into.
Community Dream Mapping
Through individual reflection and group collaging, we create a visual representation of the community we dream of and want to build towards. Imagining new possibilities for our communities is rigorous and joyful work and by articulating our vision for the future, we are able to set collective goals and get clearer on the steps it will take to get there.
Journey Mapping
Using a physical timeline, we map our personal journeys to trace patterns and explore how our stories relate. We identify where our stories interact with public systems (in positive, negative, and/or changeable ways).
Root Cause Analysis
Using the symbolism of a tree, we engage with root cause analysis to look at a problem of the group’s choosing. The leaves represent symptoms of a problem and the roots represent the complex system of causes that flow into a problem. This activity allows us to identify places where solutions can be implemented to affect a larger than life problem.
Reach Out Today to Design Your Training
In addition to the programs above, we offer extended training series and customized capacity-building partnerships designed to meet your unique goals. We collaborate with youth groups, community-based organizations, schools, public systems, and legislative partners to co-create learning experiences that are practical, engaging, and transformative.
We are committed to access and equity. Funding is available to provide free or low-cost trainings for nonprofit youth-serving organizations, and we offer sliding-scale options for larger nonprofits, public agencies, and for-profit partners. We will work with you to design an approach that aligns with your vision and budget.
Connect with us to explore what’s possible.