Here's a small sampling of the projects that we’ve worked on that speak to our approach:
Leadership Learning Community’s Learning Framework
Leadership Learning Community: Learning Framework Refinement and Design
Leadership Learning Community (LLC) began in 2000 with the goal of deepening the network engagement of local field leaders through shared tools, resources, curriculum approaches, practices and challenges. Since then, through partnership with local community leaders, the intersection of race and leadership has become a focal point of LLC’s work, and now they are a Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC)-led organization working in liberatory leadership and practices, striving to do just work in just ways, while continuing to hold space for collective leadership to advance equity and liberation. The StarLion Collective was invited in to support the LLC team to deepen, clarify, and complete their learning framework – a singular place that holds their values, beliefs, strategies, activities, desired outcomes and vision, intended to guide them into the next three to five years of their work as a mission driven organization.
California Health Care Foundation: Evaluation & Learning Project
In June 2020, the California Health Care Foundation (CHCF) engaged The StarLion Collective to co-design and co-lead a community-driven participatory inquiry with Black and BIPOC-identified community-based doulas in Los Angeles County, starting with the following overarching learning question: What are the conditions necessary for community-based doulas to make the most impact towards improving pregnancy and birth outcomes for Black women and birthing people and their babies? Drawing from community doulas’ personal lived experiences and their experiences working in community-based doula programs – particularly incidences of harm and rupture – the project’s report captures collaboratively identified lessons learned and makes recommendations to the field for scaffolding community-based doula programs in ways that center deep equity and promote anti-racist approaches to interrupt the habits of white supremacy that are interwoven into the fabric of the American health system.
Reproductive Health Equity Project: Equity Coaching + Capacity Building
The Reproductive Health Equity Project (RHEP) is a collective impact campaign with the intention of significantly decreasing the inequitable sexual and reproductive health outcomes that disproportionately impact adolescents and young adults in the California foster care system through training and education, policy development and implementation, narrative-shifting communications strategies, and community engagement. An intended strategy of RHEP’s framework is centering the voices and leadership of those most impacted - current and former foster youth. The StarLion Collective provided one-on-one and group coaching to coalition members and young folks to incorporate principles of racial equity into the reproductive wellness framework, including supporting the implementation of a youth participatory action research project, wherein former foster youth collected data from over 500 young people currently in foster care to understand racial disparities in treatment and access to care.
Parenting for Liberation: Strategic Navigation, Organizational Strategy Coaching, and Evaluation Support
Parenting for Liberation (P4L) was launched in 2016 as a virtual platform to connect, inspire, and uplift Black parents as they navigate and negotiate raising Black children within the U.S. socio-political context. P4L’s mission is to support Black parents to heal from historical and ongoing trauma, interrupt intergenerational violence, and build resilient and joyful Black families in community. The StarLion Collective has provided organizational strategy coaching, ongoing strategic navigation (including developing P4L’s Theory of Change) and program impact evaluation support to inform organizational priority-setting and resource development and allocation, to enable the organization to deepen its impact in community and in the parenting approach field that acknowledges the role of historical and intergenerational trauma and remains grounded in the specific and unique needs of parents and caregivers who identify as Black who are raising Black children.
Joe Goode Performance Group: Racial Equity Mapping
Joe Goode Performance Group (JGPG), a performing arts/dance organization in San Francisco, California, engaged The StarLion Collective to conduct an equity audit, in order to undertake a serious examination of its current organizational landscape and climate. While equity audits are fast becoming a widely used tool used in the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) arena -- intended to help nonprofit leaders understand and gather data about their organization’s culture, programs, operations, finances, and governance -- we intentionally resist the connotations of dominance, surveillance, and control inherent in the word “audit” and instead conceived of our work as “mapping” – or the gathering and producing knowledge of a place/site by locating important aspects/properties in the landscape, locating one’s position in relation to a larger spatial context, often for the practical purpose of navigation on a journey. The equity mapping project conducted with JGPG was designed to identify the ways in which the organization may be unintentionally maintaining patterns of racism and white supremacy. Gaining a more robust understanding of the ways in which race informs the daily relationships and operations at JGPG increased the capacity of its staff and board to uncover, recognize, and challenge inequities internal to its organization AND make strategic choices of where to focus their energy to meaningfully operationalize racial equity.
Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center: Racial Equity Coaching
Jeanne Geiger Crisis Center, a historically all- or majority-white organization serving survivors of intimate partner violence in a suburb near Boston, Massachusetts, enlisted coaching services from The StarLion Collective for its CEO and COO as they lead their organization through a transformation process toward becoming anti-racist. Coaching support includes: general consciousness raising around theoretical frameworks and principles undergirding anti-racism and equity transformation work; capacity building and leadership development around creating organizational policies and practices that support equity and anti-racism; specific guidance around a newly formed Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) committee within the organization; and support implementing a healing and repair process from a recent acquisition of an organization in a neighboring, and predominantly Latinx and Spanish-speaking, community.
Race Forward’s Racial Equity in the Arts Innovation Lab
Race Forward supported sixty New York City arts and cultural organizations to participate in its Racial Equity in the Arts Innovation Lab, a yearlong training program where leaders developed and implemented strategic racial equity prototypes that incorporate training on topics such as racial justice, community and stakeholder engagement, race-explicit policymaking and cultural equity. Arts Lab cohort member teams received individualized coaching around racial equity principles and practices over the course of the Lab from The StarLion Collective.
The Survivor Centered Advocacy Project
With research justice as its strategic framework, and using Community-Based Participatory Research methodologies as a starting point, this project was a transformative journey of co-learning to build greater shared understanding across the domestic violence field about the definition and practice of “survivor centered advocacy.” This project partnered with community-based advocates and organizers as more than merely the objects of study, but as co-researchers and ultimately the research leads in the research design, implementation, and analysis. The StarLion Collective were critical thought-partners in the design process and held an administrative role in its implementation. Click here to read the case study highlighting a new Community Led Research framework that StarLion Collective members created and co-authored.
Gathering Strength: Immigrant & Refugee Communities Ending Violence
Fueled by a strong belief that the community members most impacted by a problem must be the ones defining it, making decisions about responses, and identifying solutions, the Gathering Strength project was launched in 2012 to prototype a radically different approach to ending domestic violence (DV) in immigrant and refugee communities. Rather than working to increase the cultural competency of “mainstream” domestic violence service agencies that may serve some members of the target populations, the Gathering Strength project invested in advocates already working within immigrant and/or refugee communities or in culturally-specific anti-domestic violence programs that are often marginalized and invisible in the mainstream DV field. The StarLions Collective contributed to the leadership, co-design, and implementation of project activities that included community capacity building on topics ranging from grassroots outreach and organizing, participatory research, and resource development; individual and group coaching; and facilitation of strategic visioning retreats.
Network Weavers Learning Lab
Launched in 2017, the Network Weaver Learning Lab (NWLL) was an 18-month program that was co-created to deepen and expand our understanding of what it takes to be a successful network leader, spread those learnings throughout the domestic violence (DV) field in California, and evolve our common understanding of leadership at the individual, organizational, and networked levels. The Network Weaver Learning Lab was comprised of Strong Field Project’s Leadership Development Program (LDP) alumni and key anti-oppression /anti-violence allies in the state who are exploring what it would take to create a network leadership pipeline for the California DV field that is 1) better at network weaving, and 2) better equipped to be networked leadership hubs or lead those hubs. The StarLion Collective participated in the Lab’s first iteration and are now strategic thought-partners for moving forward a new iteration of the project. The Healing CookBook and Medicine Deck draw on cooking as a metaphor for sharing approaches and medicine with others working to end relationship-based violence and other intersectional forms of oppression. They hold reflections and tools that invite and support us to foster healthier, more loving, liberated relationships, and communities.
“Justicia Linguistica” by A. Samsel, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
Language Justice
The StarLion Collective actively partners with language justice advocates, activists and collectives to enhance the evidence base and create a practice model for building multilingual spaces in research, evaluation, and advocacy contexts. The StarLion Collective co-authored a blog post for the American Evaluation Association (AEA). The blog post is also available in Spanish. Download the presentation and workbook from our workshop at the 2018 AEA conference. Read a research article co-authored by The StarLion Collective published in the journal, New Directions for Evaluation, in 2020.