OUR APPROACH
Transformative experiences of power and love that improve a team’s creativity, impact and freedom.
Our approach is rooted in the power of the collective. We utilize workshops, coaching and hands-on experiential learning to help your team become greater than the sum of your parts.
We know what it feels like to be stuck with limited ways of thinking and unuseful habits that keep you from achieving your goals. Through years of experiences, we’ve learned how to interrupt what is holding you back, and help you build the practices and relationships that will help achieve your vision.
Our tailored learning experiences help team members understand how to build and share power and love, revealing new opportunities for creativity and growth that they never thought possible. Through all our projects – team focused or 1:1 – we move partners through four phases of adult learning: awareness, analysis, action and accountability.
We are here to help you take your strongest next steps towards your mission and goals in service of the world we’re working together to create.
HOLISTIC AND TEAM-FOCUSED
Our approach brings together strategic thinking, organizational development, and power-shifting into one cohesive experience.
Organizational
Development
Coach the whole team’s collective skills. Train your relationships, and weave together a stronger foundation for collaboration and innovation.
Strategic
Thinking
Create a compass, not a map. Don’t create a paper that will sit on a shelf, learn the habits and practices of thinking strategically, and set a direction to use in daily decision-making.
Power
Shifting
Understand systems of power and how to change them for the benefit of your vision, and goals.
We take these disciplines out of their silos and weave them together:
We break the cycle of isolated projects that leads to disconnected learning, wasted energy, and stalled progress.
This interdisciplinary approach radically improves the integration of new skills and practices, and helps adult learners to more quickly apply their learning to day-to-day work.
WHAT WE DO
We partner for creativity, impact and freedom through a variety of client structures:
Communal Team Coaching
Make a lasting change on your team by integrating the habits and practices that will help you achieve your goals. Transform your relationships, strategies, and impact.
Through a multi-phase team coaching process we will: map skills gaps and growth areas, engage in experiential learning (coaching, hands-on projects, participatory workshops), and integrate impact into the team. We will then evaluate the learning from that phase, and take it into a next round of development and growth.
Great for: lasting organization-wide change (typically 6 to 18 months)
Portland Museum of Art
“At the Portland Museum of Art, we hired Up With Community to help guide our work around Diversity, Equity, Accessibility, and Inclusivity. Nicola Chin was enlightening, motivating, and uplifting. Her energy, style, and ability to explain complex issues help move us forward as a staff, together. She becomes your mentor, your confidant, and your friend while all the time leading you towards a path that is sustainable and thoughtful. Most importantly, she helps you create a responsible path for your institution to move forward confidently.”
– Elizabeth Jones
Deputy Director and Director of External Affairs
School of Social Work, University of Maine
“At the School of Social Work, University of Maine, our work with Nico began a year ago with her Landscape Analysis of issues of racial justice and equity within the School of Social Work community. Based on her interviews and focus groups with students, alumni, staff, faculty, and supervisors of students in their field placements, Nico provided us with an insightful report of what we do well and where we fall short, laying out a list of recommendations for next steps. She has since skillfully guided us in communicating these findings, soliciting feedback from our community, and proceeding forward in planning and implementing our work toward greater equity and racial justice. Nico does this work through an effective combination of extensive experience, kindness, humor, insight, and strong commitment to issues of equity and justice.”
– Sandra Butler, PhD
Professor, Director and MSW Coordinator
AGG Consulting
“The Strategic Nonprofit worked with Nico to learn how to design our product using a framework of equality and justice. We came to her with personal and professional goals we had no idea how to attain. After 6 months of working together, we have the foundation of a very different approach to our product that will, in fact, reach our goals, and we’re excited to start building. Nico taught us, challenged us, and nurtured us, all in a warm and safe space. She paced our learning with perfect understanding of when we were ready to move on to new concepts and when we needed more time with concepts we had already covered. It has been exactly what we needed.”
– Allison Grappone
Owner
Focused Projects
Offer your team a hands-on learning experience through a targeted project. Advance a concrete outcome (strategic plan, staff retreat) while learning new practices for improved team collaboration and communication
We will solidify your outcomes, design an effective road-map for learning new skills as you complete your project.
Great for: Short-term outcomes like strategic planning, project development, or a staff retreat.
Mi’kmaq Nation (Formerly The Aroostook Band of Micmacs)
“The Mi’kmaq Nation was pleased to have Nico and Craig present an equity training for all staff in March of 2022. It was such a success for everyone involved with lots of positive feedback from the staff following the event. It gave staff an opportunity to think about equity in a way that made it more ‘real’ to us through the activities presented and they were especially appreciative of that. We would highly recommend Nico and Craig for any organization.”
– Dr. Dena Winslow
Tribal Planner
L.L.Bean Inc.
“Nicola has worked with us in our earliest stages of change efforts around diversity, inclusion and our evolving culture and business. Her role with us has been multiple: strategic thought partner, coach, meaning maker, consultant, designer, educator and facilitator. She brings a valuable combination of characteristics to her engagements: knowledge, experience, empathy, play, discipline, rigor and a perspective that encompasses the whole system we are seeking to influence and change. Her guidance pushes us to identify and anchor all actions in cultural and business objectives. She partners with deep integrity and respect, enabling her to meet leaders where they are while challenging them toward greater growth and development. She actively demonstrates great care for our brand, business and people, as she challenges us to edge forward on this journey toward a clearer path for sustainable success.”
– Janice O’Rourke
Senior Leader Development and Organizational Learning
Learning for Action
“Nico’s support was transformational for both me as a leader and to our organization. She supported me in understanding what is truly needed of leaders working for racial equity and justice and how to keep making progress on my own equity journey as a white woman in the social justice space. She helped our organization to reimagine our mission, vision, and values in a way that centers equity for our team and the communities we ultimately seek to impact. Her facilitation style and ability to hold complexity, humanity, tension, and love simultaneously is a powerful combination. I cannot recommend her highly enough!”
– Emily Boer Drake, MPA
Co-CEO
Peer Learning Exchanges
Take your partnerships to the next level of impact by creating a shared learning experience on the skills and practices you will need across organizations to build toward your collective long term goals.
We create a monthly peer-learning cohort of partners to focus on specific topics your partnership needs to improve or develop for the next phase of your work.
Great for: Partnerships, networks, collaboratives and coalitions seeking to deepen their relationships and collective impact.
The National Organic Coalition
“The National Organic Coalition has benefited greatly from taking part in the Up With Community Equity Learning Cohort. Now our leadership team has a shared toolbox that we can use to advance our equity work and a concrete plan in place for the next steps we want to take to move this work forward. As our coalition, we are excited to share the insights and tools we are now using with many other organizations in the organic community. In that way, we believe the impact will extend beyond NOC’s staff team. One unexpected benefit for me of participating in the cohort is that some of the tools we’ve started using to help us be more impactful in our equity work are helping us be more impactful in all areas of our work to advance organic agriculture.”
– Abby Youngblood
Executive Director
1:1 Liberatory Coaching
We are excited to meet leaders who are ready to grow power and love in your leadership, your careers and their impact in the world. Often, coach partners come to us with a core question:
- What’s my best next step?
- Where can I grow?
- How can I be a stronger leader on my team?
- How can I help my team through change?
We build a coaching partnership where you experience the answers to these questions, and you build the skills to implement those answers in your career and your communities.
Great for: Individuals seeking more power and love in their leadership
Nicole Thomas
“I was moved to work with Nico because I wanted help clarifying my thoughts for a project. I showed up seeking support for the practical things. But what I received was so much deeper and exponentially more useful. Nico is so adept at helping her clients uncover the complicated, internalized beliefs that get in the way of our success. I won’t hesitate to return to her for additional support in the future.”
– Nicole Thomas
One-on-one coaching client
Self-Guided Work Spaces
Field Guide:
Building better organizational change projects
Next Step:
Taking our best next step towards freedom and justice
OUR PROCESS
No matter what the type of project, our work has 4 phases moving through awareness, analysis, action and accountability. Together we build understanding, habits, and practices of power and love into your team’s operations, strategies, and relationships.
PHASE ONE
Shared Intention for Change
Create alignment on what needs to change and why; build a roadmap for how to move through that change
PHASE TWO
Foundations and Practices
Use foundational tools of power and love to begin developing the habits and practices of the growth you want
PHASE THREE
Experiments and Systems
Establish projects and initiatives to support testing and implementing new tools throughout your team
PHASE FOUR
Lasting Change
Solidify the lasting change of your work through embedded structures and processes for your organization, and your partners/sector