For this service product, Sweet Livity™ provides a unique combination of holistic, customized wellness and capacity building services to support workers and leaders to:
a) Create safe space with one’s peers to support effective information sharing, learning, decision-making, problem-solving and trust-building;
b) Hold conversations on race, class and culture in an inclusive and supportive way;
c) Develop common definitions for key terms to reduce misunderstandings and confusion;
d) Understand one’s own cultural lens and how your cultural lens influences how you think and respond to different situations;
e) Gain an understanding of other people’s cultural lens and how this understanding can help you relate more effectively to people from different cultural backgrounds;
f) Address the historic and existing oppression experienced by people around race, class, gender and other identity issues; and,
g) Recognize and minimize power dynamics that happen in groups and move from “power over” to “power with” and “power within.”
Why a focus on change and equity initiatives?
In this moment within our country, our local communities, and our organizations, our personal and collective work around diversity, inclusion and equity looms as critically important to our well-being and our impact. How we lead matters.
Sweet Livity’s work is designed within the context of “learning by doing,” co-creating safer spaces with clients to advance conversations and values-based decisions around leadership, culture, race, equity, intersectionality and mutual accountability.
Attention to leadership and equity is, at its core, transformational change work. It is important in transformational change work to understand the innate linkage of inner and outer work, and support workers and leaders social to heal from internalized oppression while strengthening their external work to end structural oppression.
Sweet Livity™ centers empowerment and wellness, supporting clients to articulate a wholehearted vision for their leadership and their work towards equity. To skillfully navigate their interior landscapes. To identify and overcome internal and external barriers to fulfillment of their vision.
Coming from an asset-based approach rather than a deficit or a needs assessment approach, any training and coaching as part of this work supports each client stakeholder to feel good about themselves, to understand and appreciate the many assets they have, and draw on these assets to problem-solve together. Focusing on assets ensures that each participant can contribute to their own leadership development process in those areas where they feel they have something of value to contribute. The idea is to build on the principles of health realization to affirm that each of us is born with “innate health and resilience” that can never be taken away.
With training and follow-up support, clients are equipped to continue their important transformational change work beyond the consultancy. Client stakeholders learn together how to allow their innate resilience to emerge, connect with their common sense and intuition, and tap into the universal capacity for creative problem-solving or “inner wisdom.”
The result of practicing these principles with each other and other stakeholders allows an expansive sense of emotional freedom and well-being. The aim is for everyone engaged in the change process to have better relationships with one another because they are building relationships from a position of “I’m strong in these ways and you’re strong in these ways, and we can connect on that level” versus “I’m needy in this way and you have this, and so I need you” or vice versa.
Services may range from introductory workshops and trainings, and referral to resources, to design and facilitation of transformative equity and change processes at institutional, regional, statewide and national levels.
Results
Transformative change and equity initiatives services support clients to learn and apply culturally-based approaches to effectively plan, implement, and evaluate their efforts. Clients gain capacity to:
- Create safe space to have conversations around diversity, equity, inclusion, cultural humility, and interdependence.
- Articulate in their own voice the definitions of the terms diversity, equity, inclusion, and cultural humility, and why these concepts are critical to achieving their vision.
- Define a collective vision for what is possible for them, their business and the communities in which they operate if diversity, equity, inclusion, cultural humility and interdependence was embedded in every aspect of their work.
- Feel and appreciate the value proposition for moving to a norm in our businesses and in society where diversity, inclusion, equity and interdependence in the norm.
- Build greater motivation, trust and accountability within their current staff, board, membership and partnerships to make a focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, cultural humility and interdependence as core business practices.
- Give and receive mutual support to move their efforts around diversity, equity, inclusion and cultural humility with the support of Sweet Livity™ and other local, regional, national and global resources.