Our Work
Water Bear Collaborative offers the following services:
Collaboration & Facilitation | Strategy | Program Design & Execution | Trainings & Workshops
Collaboration & Facilitation
We offer expert process design and facilitation of in-person and remote multi-stakeholder collaborative change initiatives, networks and collaboratives, and organizations. We design and support high-performance collaborative networks using a developmental approach that empowers groups to effectively self-manage over time. We tend to group culture and power dynamics and foster collaborative leadership alongside a focus on impact. Our facilitation work is informed by the fields of collective impact, network theory, systems and complexity, Theory U, social movements, somatics, and decades of lived experience.
We also marshal our expertise in network mapping and analytics, process design, and governance frameworks in service of collaborative impact.
Strategy
Our approach to strategy builds change pathways to change that integrate diverse perspectives and knowledges, tend to the root causes of issues, and minimize unintended consequences of our interventions. We help organizations and networks develop impactful strategy while fostering leadership and healthy group culture. We bring a strong equity orientation and deep roots in the fields of food and farming, water, and climate change.
We can work with you to include some or all of the following aspects:
Align.
Create a shared story about what’s happening and where we want to go. We make sure we are bringing in the right voices to enable powerful conversations, new ways of thinking, and collective sense-making about the systems we want to shift. This can be supported by interviews, focus groups, network mapping, surveys, convenings, landscape analysis, and more.
Act.
Craft and implement strategic pathways that maximize impact. We help you design and activate powerful action with a clear systemic theory of change and guiding framework. We offer coaching and on-tap support to move ideas into action.
Reflect.
Evaluate and adjust as needed. Even with the best planning, intervening in complex systems can lead to unexpected outcomes. It’s essential that leaders working on change initiatives build practices and a culture that support ongoing reflection, learning, and course-correcting.
Grow.
Work to shift systems into powerful opportunities for personal and team growth. A systems approach encourages seeing our own limiting beliefs, probing our assumptions, and liberating our thinking. At the group level, we support collaborative leadership - our capacity to work effectively and joyfully across difference toward shared goals.
Project Design & Execution
Water Bear Collaborative provides short-term, on-tap project development, management, and evaluation services to social change organizations and collaboratives. We have supported the creation of project management frameworks, campaigns, and communications pieces such as white papers, landscape assessments, project work plans, and infographics.
Trainings & Workshops
Our curated trainings and workshops support our clients in being effective, connected leaders. We have extensive expertise helping our clients work strategically to address challenging and interconnected issues at the intersection of ecology and social justice.
Please click titles below for more details on each of our trainings and workshops:
