Foundations of Shared Power:
Practical Tools for Collaborative Leadership
REGISTER HERE: 3 SESSION ONLINE COURSE STARTS MAY 28THYou believe in the power of collective action over autocracy.
You want meaningful participation from everyone on your team.
You understand that working collaboratively creates healthier, happier, and more effective work environments.
But the reality often looks different:
- Meetings drag on without clear outcomes
- The same voices dominate while others disengage
- Decisions get stuck in endless discussion or happen by default
- Accountability becomes a struggle without traditional hierarchy
- Power dynamics create problems, even when everyone has good intentions
It's not that collaboration doesn't work. It's that effective collaboration requires specific skills and systems that most of us were never taught.
"We deeply value collaboration across class and race. As we've grown it's been more and more challenging for me to figure out how to make sure everyone's role, accountabilities, and decision-making is clear.
I know that our collaborative decision-making results in better outcomes but the processes often take a long time and we don't have clear norms around how and when we use a collaborative process."
Imay Ho, Executive Director, Resource Generation
Join us!
Register HereTransform How Your Team Works
In this focused 3-session training, you'll move beyond theory to explore practical frameworks that make collaborative leadership work:
Session 1: Creating the Container for Shared Leadership
- Map power dynamics to identify where collaboration breaks down
- Set up transparent systems for tracking team decisions and progress
- Learn the Standard Meeting Practice that keeps everyone engaged with clear outcomes
Session 2: Facilitating Engagement Through Participant-Driven Meetings
- Discover why "tensions" are your greatest resource for innovation
- Define clear roles that share power while maintaining accountability
- Build agendas that engage everyone and address what truly matters
Session 3: Processing Tensions for Action and Accountability
- Master the Integrative Consent process for efficient, collaborative decisions
- Apply the Pattern-Project-Person framework to process any issue effectively
- Create collaborative accountability systems that work better than traditional hierarchy
This course provided me with a strong framework on "power" and reliable practices for what it takes to truly share power in a way that generates collective integrity, trust, dignity, and enjoyment. I really enjoyed the group learning activities and the homework assignments that moved me to put these ideas into everyday practice. In this time of human-made ecological crisis created from the pathological concentration of power and wealth, learning to share power and transform conflict are urgent revolutionary skills. I felt this space supported me in becoming the kind of cooperative leader needed to facilitate the bold, yet simple changes to redistribute power towards more ethical and earthwise purposes.
Adé Oni, Founder, Dièdiè Textile Farm Coop
This was the best leadership experience I've ever had personally or professionally. I also like that those areas of your life are not mutually exclusive. This course was transformational and gave me lots of systems, structures and tools to show up as a better me in my life and in the workplace. I work at a nonprofit with a traditional hierarchy, and there are numerous ways I'm able to apply this self-organizing system for a better and healthier workplace. Dedicate the time and energy - it is worth it!
Krystal Parsons, Senior Director of Development, Austin Theatre Alliance
What You'll Walk Away With
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A template for facilitating collaborative meetings
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A mechanism for surfacing and addressing implicit power dynamics
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An effective process for accountability
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A process for making collective decisions rapidly
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How to structure your organization for responsiveness
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How to clarify who does what, who makes which decisions, and where boundaries of authority lie
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A means of metabolizing conflict before it becomes a challenging interpersonal dynamic that hinders effective collaboration
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Support for finding the right balance between providing direction and enabling genuine collaboration
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Reliable tools for implementing values in practice
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Community and support!
Join us!
Register HereWho This Is For
- Team leaders wanting to facilitate more effectively
- Managers exploring alternatives to traditional leadership
- Nonprofit staff navigating complex stakeholder dynamics
- Coaches, consultants, and trainers building cooperative capacity
- The curious: can cooperative methods actually work?
This work has been transformational! Not only am I more conscious now of the implicit power dynamics in my teams and organizations, but I have the tools to make them explicit and to help transform them. Collab has filled a lot of gaps in my knowledge and practice of collaborative leadership and has immediately resulted in tangible positive outcomes for me and my teams. As a leadership coach, consultant and practitioner, I feel more confident and better equipped in my ability to support my clients and impact systems at scale.
Kristen Del Simone, Founder, Entelechy
Collab has provided an excellent path to build my capacity as a collaborative, participatory leader within my home organizations. Through Collab, participants are able to unpack the source functional elements of leadership and management within themselves and their teams in order to distribute work in ways that are more equitable, visible, and accountable.
Mike Strode, Founding Coordinator, The Kola Nut Collaborative
The Format
- Online interactive format with breakout rooms
- Comprehensive templates you can implement immediately
- Ongoing access to the learning platform including the Collab Manual and course session recordings
- Discussion forum for questions between sessions
- Access to monthly Community of Practice calls after completion
- Three 90 minute sessions from 12:30-2 PM ET May 28st, June 4th, June 11th.
Meet Your Instructors!
Cecile Green is a visionary, social entrepreneur, experiential philosopher, and homesteader with a passion for creating an ecology of practices for shared power that works in many different contexts so that we can collectively navigate the meta-crises to a healthy world. As an integral scholar-practitioner and lifelong learner, she holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Community Supported Agricultural Systems and has over three decades of experience in entrepreneurial environments. She has participated in nearly a dozen organizational launches and built from the ground up four successful businesses.
Daniel Little is fiercely committed to supporting socially responsible leaders to achieve success without losing the deeply held values that inspired them to make the world a better place through their work. If you are looking for a dedicated ally for your growth who can guide you with great strength and compassion to address challenges you may have faced for years, like being more effective with the limited time you have, managing change in a kaleidoscopic marketplace, or dealing skillfully with difficult relationships, then you’re in the right place.
Founded in 2012, we are a worker coop researching, synthesizing and teaching effective knowledge and practice systems for effective cooperation. Click here for more!
As someone who has quite a bit of experience in group development, this program really helped me understand tools that can improve accountability and clarity in groups, how to better locate where conflict and/or frustrations in a team might be coming from, and therefore how to build greater alignment and work through team issues. I am particularly grateful for some of the ideas in Collab for how to structure groups to have strong collective governance and management. I have found myself sharing and integrating many learnings from Collab (from bigger structures to simple phrases) in my life and work with teams.
Rachel Isreeli, Cooperative Development Consultant, RiseBoro Community Partnership
The course allowed me the opportunity to hone my understanding and experiences of cooperative and democratic governance and leadership that I've internalized over decades of participation; while also providing me with new models and templates of autonomous interdependence and accountability which I perceive as a constant and major failing of many group processes and participants.
Frank Cetera, Business Transfers Program Director, The Democracy at Work Institute
What You Get
- 3 frameworks that map the territory of cooperative leadership
- 3 practical tools you can use in any team to achieve better collaboration
- 3 templates for tracking and sharing information (since information is power)
- Access to the learning platform, forums, and monthly Community of Practice calls indefinitely
- The opportunity to apply your course fee to an upcoming 11-week Cooperative Leadership Certification Program
This course elevated my collaborative leadership and facilitation skills to the next level! I was able to take my decade-plus of experience leading democratic organizations, engage with foundational theory, practice application right in the moment throughout the course, and ultimately integrate it all together into a practice I can use moving forward.
Latona Giwa, Birth Justice Advocate, ED of Midwest Access Project, Cofounder of Birthmark Doula Collective & the New Orleans Breastfeeding Center
This course helped me see all the ways I'd been blocking my own dreams for more democratic organizational structures just by relying on the same old ordinary meeting practices I'd been used to. This was life-transforming. And in the most powerfully practical way.
Omar Freilla, Founder, Collective Diaspora
