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COLLABORATIVE INNOVATION FOR SHARED PROSPERITY, EQUITY & SUSTAINABILITY
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WHO WE ARE
We are designers, strategists, and facilitators who help people come together and solve complex problems. We are passionate but patient, methodical yet creative—and your coaches, advisors, partners, and team members all at once.
We are specialists in collaboration and getting things done, especially the tough stuff. We bring the questions, frameworks, tools and skills to help you bring people together to solve the world's toughest, most intractable challenges. More importantly, we give you all that we have (literally) and build your team's capacity to lead change on the tough challenges too.
OUR TEAM
Strategy, Process Design, Training & Facilitation
Russ helps people who don’t know each other, and often don’t even like each other, solve complex problems together. His unique strength is creating the conditions and frameworks that support efficient and meaningful collaboration across deep sectoral and cultural boundaries.
Russ also builds the capacities of others to lead effective collaboration by speaking and teaching around the world on changing complex systems, human-centered design, and leveraging conflict and diversity as sources of strategic innovation. In his guest faculty role, he has taught workshops and graduate courses on leading social innovation, designing collective impact initiatives, polarity thinking, and creating shared value.
Process Design, Facilitation, Training, Coaching
Issac M. Carter is an Executive Leadership Coach, Critical Educator, Human Capacity Builder, Leadership and Organizational Consultant, Strategist, Certified Emotional Intelligence (EQ) and Cultural Intelligence (CQ) Assessor, Practitioner, Facilitator, and Black Male Feminist. Issac helps individuals, institutions, and system leaders and teams understand, embrace, and leverage our shared humanity by developing emotionally and culturally agile individuals, organizations, and systems.
Issac's human-centered practice focuses on the inner being and our capacities and capabilities to lead, influence, and collaborate effectively across cultures to become catalysts for change. He helps leaders, teams, institutions, and systems become more aware of how ways of feeling, knowing, being, and doing impact our lived experiences and our ability to build deep relationships interpersonally and in groups or system-level collaborations.
Human-centered Design, Facilitation, Training, Project Management
Melissa is a facilitator and process designer who supports people in co-creating the futures they imagine for themselves and their communities.
Specializing in relationship building as a vehicle to bring about positive social outcomes, Melissa brings over two decades of experience in facilitation, deepening community engagement and campaign management to her work. She is passionate about strengths-based interventions that build upon individuals' unique social and cultural assets as a strategy to solve complex social problems.
Process Design, Facilitation, Training, Graphic Facilitation
Heather Equinoss is a collaboration doula, consultant, and visual facilitator whose work is in service to a simple core belief: that the health and wellbeing of people are inextricably connected to one another and the planet that sustains us.
Heather brings 16 years of meeting design, graphic facilitation, project management and community engagement experience in public, non-profit, private, and community settings. She finds purpose in supporting people and organizations to bring about the positive change they envision in their communities and the world we live in.
Process Design, Facilitation, Training
Luzette works on social ecosystem activation and system change through the design and facilitation of transformational learning processes. She works in the areas of human development, being-well, and awareness-based leadership development for changemakers.
For two decades she has focused on social entrepreneurship through different roles at Ashoka, including launching Ashoka’s Learning & Development to deepen an organizational learning culture in support of their vision of accelerating the emergence of an “Everyone a Changemaker” world.
Human Insight Development, Research, Process Design
Maren is a design strategist, trainer, and researcher who builds partnerships for CoCreative and leads our learning and human insight development areas.
Maren is the founder and principal of Creative States, a multidimensional platform producing creative research, events and media to catalyze thoughtful provocations that explore the landscapes of tomorrow and who we might become. She trains and works with clients to develop scenarios and experiences that stimulate new ways of thinking imaginatively, legibly and critically about the future we want to create and live in.
Project Management, Coordination, Facilitation
Maricela provides project management, coordination, facilitation, and core operations support including digital media management.
Maricela’s work is informed by her experience in international network coordination, community engagement, business management, nonprofit organizational development, and mediation. She is passionate about addressing and removing obstacles to collaboration and is especially motivated by efforts centering social and environmental justice. Maricela comes to this work with commitment and excitement to support the work of teams, organizations, networks, communities, and more to strengthen individual and collective capacities to affect change.
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Project Management, Coordination, Administration
Sittie supports the CoCreative team with calendar management and project scheduling, website maintenance, graphic design and other administrative tasks. She specializes in navigating complex schedules that may span multiple time zones and can easily adapt to ever-changing client needs while also offering video editing, social media content creation and IT background services.
Sittie holds a Degree in Information Technology from Mindanao State University, Philippines. She has a passion for growth, especially in the digital world and for AI tools. When not at her computer, Sittie enjoys exploring outdoor water activities such as Scuba Diving, Surfing and Island hopping.
Business Financial Operations; Cooperative Organizational Structures; Financial Analytics and Strategy
Melissa brings almost 20 years of business design, strategy, and financial management experience to CoCreative. As Finance Lead, she oversees business accounting, financial forecasting, and analytics.
Prior to joining CoCreative, Melissa co-founded an award-winning worker-cooperative business in Berkeley, California. Melissa supports many women-owned businesses, cooperative businesses, and innovative companies with her expertise in financial operations, analysis, and strategic growth.
OUR VALUES
We are driven by our mission to create shared prosperity for current and future generations.
We prioritize impact, especially those most harmed by systems of oppression.
We are creative and dynamic in our methods and solutions.
We are methodical but we like to move fast.
We are human-centered and focused on the wisdom and experiences of real people.
We are efficient and cost-effective.
We are committed to systemic change, especially systems based in racial supremacy and economic growth that break the bonds among us and the natural world.
We are both humble and confident.
We are initiators, proactively creating networks to solve problems.
We are strategic; we know where to set the match to start a fire.
We are curious; we hold our assumptions as hypotheses and continually test them.
We are cheeky and love to work, have fun, and laugh with others.
OUR BELIEFS
We believe that the toughest problems we face in our communities, countries, and the world can only truly be solved when people come together across their differences and create the solutions together, with the people most negatively impacted by the system at the table.
That spirit of partnership, grounded in equity, guides how we work at CoCreative. Our clients are often surprised that we are as invested in the success of their projects as they are, and that we go so far above and beyond the level of commitment that many consultants bring to the work. That's because we believe that the challenges we take on really must be solved—for the good of our clients, our communities, and the world we share together.
The foundation of our work is our belief in the need for Shared Prosperity and Ecological Sustainability. Shared Prosperity refers to a world in which everyone has real opportunity to not just live, eat, and have shelter, but to truly prosper and live creative and dignified lives. Achieving Ecological Sustainability means that our children's children can enjoy the same prosperity that we do—or even better.
In order to make that world possible, we believe that 7 "system conditions" must be met...
Our 7 Conditions
Shared Prosperity
To achieve shared prosperity, we support inclusive wealth-building and work to eliminate our contribution to a progressive concentration of economic wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer entities.
A healthy economy requires that we concentrate capital at times, to start businesses for example. But systematically increasing concentration of wealth and growing income inequality over time leads to a less healthy society, an unhealthy economy, and increasingly poor outcomes for people affected by systems of oppression.
To achieve shared prosperity, we support shared political power and work to eliminate our contribution to the progressive concentration of political power by certain segments of society.
While it can be productive and healthy for citizens to assign the work of governing to representatives, our history shows that systematic concentration of political power over time is never healthy.
To achieve shared prosperity, we support shared control over common assets and work to eliminate our contribution to the progressive concentration of control over the common assets which sustain society (for example, water, air, ozone, and genetic material).
We need to agree on how to manage and use our commons assets, and private control of these resources that we all need to survive leads to unhealthy concentrations of power and wealth while also producing disparities in access and benefit for people excluded from decision-making.
To achieve shared prosperity, we help create conditions that systemically support people's choice and capacity to meet their needs, and address the systemic barriers that people of different identities and backgrounds face.
People need to work diligently to meet their needs and the needs of their families-that's good for people and society as a whole, and we need to address barriers like systemic racism, white supremacy, and anti-blackness that prevent everyone from successfully meeting their needs.
Ecological Sustainability
To achieve ecological sustainability, we cannot subject nature to systematically increasing concentrations of substances from the earth’s crust.
We pull a lot of stuff from the lithosphere (what's under the ground) and put it into our biosphere (where we live), things like heavy metals and CO2 from fossil fuels. We need to find healthy, sustainable ways to take care of both ourselves and our shared home, and ensure the protection of places that are sacred to Indigenous people.
To achieve ecological sustainability, we cannot subject nature to systematically increasing concentrations of substances produced by society.
We produce a lot of substances that never existed before, like antibiotics and endocrine disruptors. These provide lots of benefits but are harmful if they keep building up in nature over time. We believe that we can make substances that help us but don't systematically build up in our bodies and planet.
To achieve ecological sustainability, we cannot subject nature to systematically increasing degradation by physical means.
There are some things that, once we break, we can't readily put them back together again, like complex forest ecosystems, marble, or groundwater tables. Let's design ways to meet our needs that don't rely on breaking things apart that we can't put back together.
The last three "system conditions" are based on The Natural Step @ thenaturalstep.org.