About Us
Who we are
Harmonize provides coaching, courses, and consulting for mission driven individuals, teams, and groups who want to improve how they work together.
People
We are organizational development experts with backgrounds in education, law, business, and organizing, and over 30 combined years of experience. We use our See, Be & Work Together framework and our Power, Belonging, and Justice (PBJ) lens to provide holistic support attuned to the needs of humans working together.
- Vision & Strategy
- Structure & Governance
- Hiring & Recruitment
- Culture & Conflict
- Practice & Policy
- And more…
Our Vision
People have used many different words to describe the world we want to see. Some call it freedom or liberation. We call it Harmony.
Harmony looks like Justice at every scale.- Personal: All humans are sovereign, being and creating in joy.
- Interpersonal: Our relationships help us become, know & love each of our truest selves.
- Organizations: We co-create and realize our shared visions in alignment with our values.
- Systems: We nonviolently meet the needs of all with regenerative, material, interdependent structures.
- Ideological: Humanity is united by shared stories that accurately reflect and imagine each of us as our most whole expression.
- World: We create with all of Earth’s inhabitants and resources in reciprocal and regenerative relationships.
- All: We consciously connect to spirit, ancestral, energetic, and archetypal realms and more.
- Source: We derive meaning from our participation in Creation and Life as a whole.
Our Mission
Change organizations. Change the world.
Many share our vision of Harmony but struggle to move from vision to impact. Put simply, the way we’re working together isn’t working. We need to be able to create and collaborate according to our values.
We need to Harmonize.
Our mission is to equip organizations and movements with the tools, skills, & mindsets needed to achieve liberatory visions at scale and achieve Harmony.
Our Approach
To achieve Harmony we need
A unifying way of seeing our world
A healthy way of being human
A liberating way of working together
Our holistic approach creates shared ways of Seeing, Being, and Working Together in order to create organizational harmony.
Power, Belonging, & Justice
We don’t just do DEI, we go deeper to help organizations address fundamental issues and build systems that enable successful collaboration.
Far too often DEI as a framework fails to create meaningful change or advance the deeper values it champions.
Our Power, Belonging, & Justice (PBJ) lens – developed from over 30 collective years of helping organizations work better together – has proven to be more effective and transformative.
By thoughtfully applying the principles of Power & Belonging, we can create Justice at every scale. Each of these three elements impact how and what humans create together.
Our in-depth and customized training brings groups together to learn to assess the following:
- Power: Who can do what?
- Belonging: Who is in, who is out, who benefits, and why?
- Justice: What outcomes are acceptable, and how do we account for the unacceptable, in the past, present, and future?
Through our training, we’re confident that your organization will be equipped with effective tools to build a more harmonious environment and culture.
Values
Joy
We believe in the healing power of joy and that joy in the face of oppression can be a revolutionary act. Despite oppressive circumstances and conditions, we choose joy.
We resist despair and depletion by intentionally creating space for joy, laughter, silliness, and the softest parts of our humanity. Joy is the choice we make to align with Harmony in the midst of disharmony. We intentionally create joy through humor and laughter as a form of self-care that connects us to our gratitude, hope, and inner children. Intentional joy is also a tool of liberation that we use to both cope with the world as it is and sustain us as we co-create the world that we want to see.
The journey of liberation is long. We experience joy as the wind in our sails and the cool breeze that refreshes us.
In facilitation, we intentionally invite authentic joy, as the thread that weaves collaboration, communication, and trust.
Nuance & Precision
We realize that there are many ways to look at a situation. We are very reluctant to make blanket statements or rush to permanently label people, ideas, or actions. We value using discernment & patience to have the right conversation in the right order at the right time. We value the process of argumentation and difference, not as antagonism, but as a way of exploring an issue in depth.
We hold many layers of complexity and interconnection. Different moments require different types of interventions.
We listen deeply so that we can take intentional action that honors all of the rippling impacts that will occur from our choices. This often appears as prioritization of process; because we trust that when process allows us to come together in new and healthier ways, the outcomes are almost always more liberatory.
Fierce Grace
We hold high standards of conduct and clear boundaries against harm in order to call forth the best in all of us. We honor the human goodness in each person while also recognizing that some behavior has no place in our community.
We understand ourselves to all be works in progress who come to this work with different histories, personalities, struggles, and idiosyncrasies. We believe that we are strongest as a movement when we can meet each other where we are; invite ourselves and each other into deeper levels of integrity with our liberatory values; and constantly deepen our political analysis and understanding.
We aim to create spaces that allow learning and mistakes but that do not perpetuate harm. We are committed to bringing out the best in each other through an artful combination of forgiveness, permission, boundaries, and direct feedback. Further, we recognize that direct feedback about how we are missing the mark can actually be an act of love that calls us deeper into who we want to be.
We call this balance of understanding our flawed humanity, commitment to each other’s dignity and giftedness, maintenance of high standards of conduct, and protection from harm, “Fierce Grace.” We explicitly practice fierce grace with each other and with those who grant us the trust and privilege to facilitate space with them.
Integrity
We are dedicated to shedding layers of illusion, conditioning, and any internalized oppressive ways of thinking within ourselves. We see every moment as an opportunity to liberate ourselves and one another.
We believe that there is no point talking about it if we can’t be about it.
And, at the same time, there is no way to fully be about it. And talking about it is not only sometimes a way to be about it, but also a way of reminding us what we are trying to be about.
Recognizing where we miss the mark, owning, and sharing it is an opportunity to return to integrity inside ourselves. The opportunity to notice where we are/not showing up the way we want to & come deeper into alignment is a gift. The feedback we give and receive is an invitation to reflect on if/where we missed the mark.
We are here to see our own part and to own that for ourselves. When conflict inevitably arises, each individual is focused on their process, not each other’s. We aren’t here to get others to see their part and/or apologize to us.
Witnessing each other reveal how we really want to be and return to integrity helps rebuild trust. As each person takes the leap, it encourages everyone else to do the same.
