Our Approach

• Bock: defend and protect people, communities, policies, rights, etc.
• Believe: vision and dream the future we want, tend to imagination and creativity, and be guided by it daily.
• Build: bridge and deepen relationships with each other, unusual partners, and those not yet engaged in our movements, working together to build liberating alternatives to systems that never served us.
• Be: tend to our well-being individually and collectively, embracing practices of liberation such that we are in continuous connection with our simultaneous stories/wisdom, our bodies, source, and our emotions (practices of liberation evolved from the work of Monica Dennis).

We meet our client partners with the clarity needed to navigate complexity and respond from vision in chaos. In partnership with leaders, organizations, networks, and funders, we explore what is needed to bring about the world we want. Together, we work to overcome habits and practices that hold us back, and we craft creative, nimble, and authentic strategies for change. We ground our offerings in the essential elements of transformational change. 

Elements of Deep Change

Change Elemental galvanizes movements by freeing, combining, and catalyzing the necessary elements of deep change. Whether working as consultants, convening spaces for experimentation and learning, or collaborating on projects with our peers, our approach centers on deepening the interconnected practices of the key elements of transformative change.

Advancing Deep Equity

We center deep equity in all of our work, and hold it as a set of continuous practices necessary for people and the planet to experience love, dignity, and justice. These practices include recognizing the impact of our identities on our individual and collective experiences, addressing healing, as well as acting to transform institutions and systems. It is not a destination.

Cultivating Leaderful Ecosystems

We grow leadership across multiple levels, with the understanding that leadership is the capacity to align values and actions across groups of people or communities so that organizations and networks can more fluidly and effectively respond to, and influence, shifting conditions over time.

Embedding Multiple Ways of Knowing

We work with our partners to engage multiple perspectives by drawing on cultural, artistic, rational, and other forms of wisdom in order to define both problems and solutions, enabling us to craft the expansive, generative, and transformational approaches needed to advance equitable and systemic change.

Influencing Complex Systems of Change

We support changemakers in understanding and influencing the complex systems within which we all work. By catalyzing new ways of thinking and being together, we help changemakers get to the heart of—and ultimately transform—the multifaceted and interdependent problems they want to solve while holding equity at the center.

Centering Inner Work

We take the time with each other, and with our clients and partners, to focus on what is in our hearts and to attend to our bodies as well as our minds, because it is critical for being in healthy and sustainable relationship with each other, enabling us to free new power and possibilities for a world of love, dignity, and justice.

“On their own, these elements are essential components of advancing transformative justice. However, the real power comes from approaches that draw on the interconnectedness and interdependence of these elements. When intentionally engaged together, they comprise a liberating context with deep equity at the core.”

Elissa Sloan Perry, Change Elemental Core Team Member

Photo credit: Change Elemental