Purpose
Water Bear Collaborative is a consultancy that supports leaders to build alignment, navigate difference, and spark collaborative action toward visionary and just futures through well-designed and executed process.
The complex and interconnected challenges we face today require new thinking, orientations, and conversations in order to navigate ways forward that build equity, resilience and health.
Approach
We accompany our clients to build strategic clarity about the path forward toward durable and transformative change.
We bring expertise in process and meeting design and facilitation, systems and network mapping, strategic planning, collaborative governance, and learning infrastructure.
In any group process, there will be surprises and emergent opportunities that skilled facilitation can help leverage.
We don’t work from prescriptive or rigid frameworks but rather draw from a broad practical and theoretical toolbox to meet our clients’ needs. We balance both the art and science of group work, tending to relationships, power, and process as well as content, and support groups to meet whatever emerges with curiosity and flexibility.
Out of our engagement, clients report moving forward with more than the tangible outputs. Some enduring takeaways include:
A wider field of vision on how their work in the world fits into the bigger picture
A deeper understanding of how to work with complexity
Skills for bridging difference
A better ability to access their whole intelligence (head, heart, and hands)
Select Clients
Leadership
Katy is passionate about participatory change-making approaches that account for the complexity of multiple, interconnected crises and diverse lived experiences.
She is recognized as an effective and culturally competent facilitator, convener, and strategist with a track record of success working with diverse stakeholders to imagine and take action toward an equitable and regenerative future.
6 years executive nonprofit management experience
Expert in systems and network mapping
Extensive training in facilitation and group work
Certified in somatics, facilitating racial justice work, and conflict resolution.
MSc focused on working with complex systems
Fellow, Academy for Systems Change
Facilitation Coach, UFacilitate
International work supporting farming communities on four continents
Proficient in French, functional Spanish
Highlights
Recent Publications
Why Water Bear?
Water bears (aka moss piglets or tardigrades), tiny yet mighty creatures, embody resilience—the ability to adapt, learn, and thrive through crisis. They are astoundingly robust and bring us endless joy and inspiration.
Contact
(707) 239-8879
Occidental, CA