Through community, connection, deep reflection, and learning based in practices for building mutuality, the Solidarity Leadership Lab has enriched my life and my work.

I have felt supported by fellow explorers who are committed to ongoing learning and serving their community. SLL created a safe place for us to explore, to make mistakes, to connect. I’ve made friends and established relationships with colleagues who I will turn to in the future for support. I’ve learned different styles of working in organizations and ways to process and resolve conflict.

The Solidarity Leadership lab has instilled confidence in my plight. I leave more certain that I am working towards a positive ethic that can support our collective evolution in a way that I would be satisfied with.

The SLL cohort has been very important for me, both personally and professionally. The various ways of focussing on horizontal decision making, rules of engagement for working together and the broad perspective of participants all made this happen.

The Solidarity Leaders Lab was a deeply nourishing and transformative experience for me both personally and professionally. On the personal side of things, the SLL was a catalyst for crystalizing my values and making tangible the possibility of creating a more just and equal world by giving deep thought and practice as to how I interact with it. It was profoundly joyous and energizing to be community with my inspiring and world-changing cohort and each session I walked away with a feeling of gratitude and possibility. I entered the SLL at a time when I was feeling fairly downtrodden and hopeless professionally and through this lab gained tools, hope, and energy to reshape how I work with others and in the world. I know that this experience has forever shaped my understanding of what it is to lead.

SLL has made me more aware of my own and others’ inherent decency, desire for connection, and ability to build a better, more just and sustainable world. It’s also connected me to a fantastic group of people that I would not have known otherwise.

It has helped me co-create community while bringing me “back” closer to home.

The Solidarity Leadership Lab has been a welcome and much-needed reminder of the kindness, intentionality, thoughtfulness, and generosity of our beloved Hudson Valley community. I have met over twenty individuals previously unknown to me who I now consider a living resource and support system when making professional decisions and navigating conflict or uncertainty in my personal life. I look forward to continuing to integrate workshop learnings about cooperative governance, facilitation, and conflict resilience into my leadership style, and to sharing these learnings with my colleagues and collaborators. More than anything else, I am grateful to GWI for cultivating this cohort, and giving us a space in which to breathe, explore, laugh, move, and ground deeper.

The Solidarity Leaders Lab has been an incredibly reinvigorating experience for me. At this phase of my professional career and my personal life, I was looking for a program that could introduce me to new ways of thinking about my core value system, community engagement, communication, fostering constructive dialogue, navigating conflict, and creating safe spaces. In the lab, I’ve been able to build a new relationship with myself as a student and active listener, learning new ways of organization building and structure, empathy, engagement, and curiosity. Through the retreat, workshops, and group exercises, as well as the Communities of Practice, I’ve found numerous ways to integrate what I’ve learned into my career, tools that I can immediately bring back to my organization, and ways to share what I’ve learned with my community. I felt incredibly inspired by each member of the cohort– everyone brought a diverse array of professional and personal experiences.

This lab appeared at a time when I needed it most: a next step shown to me while I was in a deep fog. A deep fog created by a society that divides us into “others,” tells us to be fearful of said “others,” and tells us to eliminate that threat, the “other,” in order to be safe ourselves. This lab reminded me how we may all have vastly different strategies, yet we have the same basic needs, and none of them are actually to destroy “others.” Being in community, sharing our vulnerabilities, dreams and hopes, sharing in beauty. A space was created to go within, to look deeply into myself, and to revel in what is there. This lab facilitated my re-emergence. I am extremely grateful.

I have met the most incredible people in this SLL (including Micah, Helene, Mitzy and Aja). It has been a precious gift that I would never have accessed otherwise. And the beautiful retreat.

While the trainings, teachings, and workshops were wonderful in and of themselves, the cohort, the ways community was visibly created among us, as a living practice was a beautiful and welcome surprise. The relational learnings were multi-directional, deeply situated, warm, and real. These are the intangible and emergent things that good facilitation can make space for. This living proof of the principles shared was a learning from the experience that I also got to live and to witness.