Z! Haukeness designed and led a training for Sierra Club Wisconsin on Navigating Conflict and Creating a Culture of Belonging that helped participants identify conflict and how it feels in the body. Through group discussion and small group work, participants were able to talk through imagined scenarios and conflict in their own lives. Z! was communicative, asked for feedback and easy to work with throughout the process! – Jadine Sonoda, Campaign Coordinator, Sierra Club of WI
Bring me to your organization to lead a training on Navigating Conflict and Creating a Culture of Belonging
Contact me for a consultation so I can get a better idea of what your needs are and how I can best meet them through one or multiple trainings, one-on-one coaching, and other resources to help you navigate the day to day conflicts that are a given with organization building.
The packaged training that can be adapted is interactive and includes a discussion of tools to understand conflict such as The Triangle; reflection on how we as individuals handle conflict and how we strengthen our approach going forward; surfacing ideas for how your organization can improve our approach to handling conflict; using somatics practices to use our bodies and emotions to navigate conflict well; and active practice supporting one another in handling conflict with integrity.
I have helped build and lead various justice organizations in Madison, WI, statewide in Wisconsin, and nationally. I now live in Louisville, KY and am passionate about engaging in conflict in a productive way that fosters wholeness, organizational health, and cultures of belonging in our movements and in our world.
This isn’t a transformative justice process, instead it is like a wellness check up to strengthen your culture and practices for the inevitable conflicts that happen daily in organizations. Community organizing and organiztion-building are relationship based activities. All true relationships have conflicts that arise that we need to work through. There aren’t a lot of hollywood movies about working through movement conflicts, but there could be! We put so much passion into our work for justice and liberation, we spend so much time doing it, and the opposition tries to fuel the flames of any conflict that arises. We need examples, practices, and support to handle any conflicts that come up well. Also, having principled struggle with one another (as NTanya Lee says), is key to sharpening our analysis and strategy.
Creating a culture of belonging goes hand in hand with engaging in conflict well. We have to be affirming, have roles for new people, support people’s leadership development, have direction, but also need to be able to acknowledge where our work could get better, or the experience of members, staff or stakeholders could improve.