Learning & Change

We’ve facilitated local, statewide, regional, and national learning and change work with adult and youth community organizers, nonprofits, foundations, coalitions, and capacity-builders focused on issues including the arts, educational equity, social and emotional learning, food justice, people-friendly streets, criminal-legal reform, the relationship between health and housing justice, and peer-led mental health and substance use recovery.

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 collective learning conversations that explore what your team/community knows about your work in that moment, crystallize key insights and get clear on why they matter for your work, and identify what next steps make sense in light of all that so you can evolve and adapt your practice in real-time.

Learning facilitation is particularly useful for initiatives and groups pursuing big, challenging change work in complex, dynamic environments that resist 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 change work intentionally plans for the influence of power, privilege, and participation, as well as individual attitudes toward change and how these shape our engagement.

We see change work as evolving through interconnected phases, and are happy to provide support for a specific phase of your process or a 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 consider and respond to.

  2. Sense-Making & Visioning: Via a series of facilitated conversations we’ll process the information gathered during discovery and begin to clarify your vision(s) for change. A participatory approach to these dialogues will help you begin to build consensus and ensure your decision-making represents a variety of relevant perspectives.

  3. Strategic Planning: We’ll work with you to identify the strategy approach that’s the right match for your context and then facilitate a set of interactive planning sessions to help you map out 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 groups to design and implement collaborative learning and evaluation projects. Activities may include, but are not limited to:

  • Planning & Design: program mapping, the development of learning questions or framing questions, principles development, theory of change work, action hypotheses/ theory of action work, and/or the development of an evaluation framework or plan

  • Data Collection: document reviews, surveys, interviews, focus groups/ group conversations, participant observation, power mapping, constituent mapping, arts-based and other interactive/ theater/ movement-based activities

  • Data Analysis: participatory data analysis, quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis (including coding and analytical mem-oing via software such as Dedoose)

  • Reporting: written materials, presentations, blogs, data visualization, mapping, facilitated sense-making

Who We Work With

Word of Mouth

  • “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

  • “Kai is an industry leader of such grace and intelligence. She is fiercely devoted to quality, access, and equity.”

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

Interested in working together?