Learning & Change

We have 20+ years of experience facilitating local, statewide, regional, and national learning and change initiatives with adult and youth community organizers, nonprofits, foundations, coalitions, and capacity-builders focused on a range of issue areas including the arts, educational equity, social and emotional learning, food justice, people-friendly streets, criminal-legal reform, peer support and behavioral health, and housing justice.

Learning Facilitation

“The most effective people are those who can ‘hold’ their vision while remaining committed to seeing current reality clearly.” // Peter M. Senge

Drawing on our training in emergent learning, we’ll guide you through group conversations that explore what your team/community knows about your work, crystallize key insights and why they matter for your work, and identify the next steps that make sense in light of all that — so you can learn and adapt in real-time.

Regular learning facilitation is particularly useful for initiatives and groups pursuing big, challenging change work in complex, dynamic environments that confound the structures and timelines of more fixed planning and evaluation approaches.

Change Strategy

“When people think many different thoughts and move in the same direction, that’s a movement.” // Loretta Ross

Our approach to co-creating strategy intentionally plans for the influence of power and privilege — as well as individual attitudes toward change and how these shape our engagement.

We see this work as evolving through three phases, and can support a specific phase or the full strategy cycle:

  1. Discovery: We’ll gather information about the past and present contexts for your change work, which your strategy (or strategies) will need to work with/in.

  2. Sense-Making & Visioning: Together we’ll process the information gathered in “discovery” and surface your vision(s) for change. A participatory approach to this process can help you build consensus amongst stakeholders, and ensure decision-making is grounded in all relevant perspectives.

  3. Strategic Planning: We’ll work with you to identify the strategy approach that best suits your context and facilitate a set of interactive planning sessions to map what you believe it will take to reach your vision.

Collaborative & Participatory Evaluation

“Everything worthwhile is done with other people.” // Mariame Kaba

We work with you to co-design and facilitate collaborative learning and evaluation projects. Specific activities could include:

  • Planning & Design: program mapping, developing learning/framing questions, identifying principles, theory of change, action hypotheses, and/or the creation of a learning agenda or evaluation plan

  • Data Collection: document reviews, surveys, interviews, group conversations, participant observation, mapping (power, relationship, systems), and other creative approaches

  • Data Analysis & Synthesis: participatory data analysis, quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis (including coding and analytical mem-oing via software like Dedoose), and/or facilitated sense-making

  • Documentation & Dissemination: written reports, presentations, blogs, data visualization, and other creative approaches

Who We Work With

  • The Victoria Foundation
  • The Colorado Health Foundation
  • The Mosaic Network & Fund in the New York Community Trust
  • Public Welfare Foundation
  • Denver Streets Partnership
  • Colorado Blueprint to End Hunger
  • The Clyfford Still Museum
  • Rise Above Colorado
  • Denver Scholarship Foundation
  • The Buddy Program
  • Youth INC
  • The Teaching Artists Guild
  • Culture for One

Word of Mouth

  • "Kai’s depth of knowledge and ability to take broad ideas and distill them into meaningful, actionable steps has been critical for our work. Our team was able to lean into emergent learning principles and we continue to include the tools in our ongoing practices. Her facilitation approach provides space for inquiry, thoughtful decision-making, and consensus building. Partnering with Kai has helped shape our thinking and articulate our values toward our organizational goals."

    Sharnita C. Johnson, Vice President - Strategy, Impact and Communications at The Victoria Foundation

  • “Kai’s brain takes up space in a room, her ego doesn’t. This allows for other people’s brains to join hers! She excels at inviting a group to tackle a problem and has a manner that encourages everyone to bring their best brain waves but not their most fragile ego. She has a keen sense of what is important and helps entire groups of people focus their attention together.”

    Lindsey Buller Maliekel, Director of Education & Public Engagement at the New Victory Theater

  • “Kai is particularly helpful with qualitative methods and analyses — but more importantly, her writing and synthesis of findings is spot on, with a deep sensitivity to context, culture, and equity. And, in our capacity-building work, I can rely on her to create a culture of support that makes evaluation and research more accessible.”

    Kim Sabo Flores, CEO at Hello Insight

  • “Kai brings an expertise and facilitation style that helped me grow my knowledge and skills. Each session left me feeling excited to implement my new learning.”

    Adrian Mendoza, Assistant Director of Advisement at the Denver Scholarship Foundation

  • “Kai’s approach to facilitating my learning and fostering organizational growth was excellent. She brought new tools, resources, and knowledge to every session and we immediately turned it into action with our colleagues.”

    Gabe Guindon, Director of College Access at the Denver Scholarship Foundation

  • “Kai was an enormous resource. She helped us take dense academic and research-based content and craft it into an engaging learning experience for youth development nonprofits. She was responsive to our needs and the needs of our nonprofit partners, organized, and diligent. The value she places on organizational learning and improving our field shines through in every interaction."

    Lauren Elicks-McCort, Chief Program Officer at Youth INC

  • "I was always impressed with Kai’s ability to manage and distill vast amounts of organizational and programmatic information from across diverse sources into succinct, compelling stories."

    Julie Poncelet, Co-Founder at Action Evaluation Collaborative

  • "Kai takes an even-keeled, asset-based, communication-first approach to her work. She listens first, provides grounding summaries of the questions to be explored, and then links solutions to practical goals and strategies with clear coaching. "

    Brooke Bockelman, Assistant Director at the Buddy Program

  • “Evaluation is less scary after walking these steps with Kai, and I just can't get enough. I feel more empowered wearing my development hat, which was not a stated outcome of this project, but a big win for me and the museum.”

    Kelly Merrion, Senior Director of Advancement & Patron Services at the Clyfford Still Museum

  • “When Rise Above Colorado decided to take a hard look at its justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion practices and policies, it turned to Coactive Change and Create Knowledge. Together, they facilitated a process that simultaneously provided knowledgeable and thoughtful guidance while empowering Rise Above to choose the path that fit best with the organization’s mission and stakeholder interests. We would highly recommend both Aisha and Kai for any organization considering a similar journey and analysis.”

    Kent MacLennan, Executive Director at Rise Above Colorado
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    Gina Tincher, Board Chair at Rise Above Colorado

  • “Working with Kai is a delight. The clarity and incisiveness of her thinking, her compelling written work, and the creativity she brought to our projects were so very valuable.”

    Jean Johnstone, Former Executive Director at the Teaching Artists Guild

Interested in working together?

LET'S CONNECT!