intersectional mentorship
for people who live, work, and play at the intersections of privilege and oppression.
who you are
You’re a leader in your community. You run a powerful team, a grassroots political effort, a survivors’ peer group. You’re a changemaker and a champion, and you like to get your hands dirty — and maybe, you’re still a little afraid that you’re f*king up this anti-oppression thing. Maybe you’re afraid that you’re not quite sure how to raise your sons to be good men, how to provide better accommodations for your chronically ill team members, how to distribute grant funding more equitably. You think you could do more, but you’re not quite sure what comes next, and you’re not sure who to ask.
You’ve done DEI 101, and you’re tired of it.
Maybe you posted a black square in June 2020, but you listened hard and sheepishly took it down a week later. Now, you run the antiracism group for your kid’s school’s PTA, you’re on the multicultural ERG at work, and you created an inclusive hiring playbook for your startup. At this point, you could probably teach that mandatory implicit bias workshop yourself.
You’ve certainly been on the receiving end of some systemic injustices, too — maybe you’re a man of color, a brown woman, a white queer person, a disabled caregiver. You’re not always sure how to hold the tension of humility with the real power you’ve had to fight to access.
And so now you’re sitting here, looking at your organization, your neighborhood, that book group you started, and you’re thinking to yourself —
Now what? Is this just…it?
You still don’t know what you don’t know, and you hate that. You want to interrogate your relationship to power and privilege, you want to hold it kindly against the oppression you’ve experienced — and you want someone to doula you through that tension.
who I am
My name is Shivani. I’m a queer disabled femme and an eldest immigrant daughter, and I have nearly two decades of experience in human-centered systems design. I teach small business owners, consultants, non-profit executives, government agents, and startup founders to steward their power well, so our praxis and practices become stronger, more sustainable, and more equitable. I help people at the margins radically care for themselves in the face of ongoing -isms, so we can grow in pleasure and abundance. My career started in life’s transitions — sex, pregnancy, abortion, birth, and death — and I bring this liminality to my work. This is the art and science of nourishing bodies to heal systems.
what we do
Over three months together, we’ll move from fear, rupture, and despair to abundant self-trust and resonant connection.
Every system of oppression exists because humans built it to be so. Every system of oppression results in harm done to bodies in exchange for power grabbed by other bodies — from the most intimate rift in a single relationship to the political control of bodily autonomy. This work is human-centered systems change, where we unlearn the ways in which power corrupts us, recover from the trauma it causes, and learn to steward it wisely.
We take lessons from transformative justice, internal family systems, somatics and embodiment work, and many others. I offer you a safe container in which to reckon honestly with power and privilege and to heal from the moral injuries caused by intersecting systems of oppression.
Equity builds within our actual and individual interactions with others, and in how responsive we are to each other. Do we turn towards the joy and pain of others? Or do we turn our backs on it? Do we become complicit in it? Together, we practice relational labor skills — the work of turning towards each other, of understanding conflict as an opportunity for repair, of mending relational injuries, of holding many truths as true at once.
Systems change means we choose one thread to unravel, one connection to influence and shift. We will trace the thread back to its knotted origin, start to loosen the loops, guide the pulse into a different direction, strengthen a new pattern. We will shift it again and again until it takes hold on its own — practiced, easeful.
That work is inherently emergent, inherently alive. Sonya Renee Taylor asks, “What does it look like to take our very precious, very tender, very necessary energy and return it to what there is for us to do in service of our own integrity and the care of one another right now?”
We’ll ask ourselves better questions and learn to build the answers.
this is not:
an individual cure to systemic oppression. We don’t “fix” individuals or pathologize humans living within systems.
easy work. I will push you to recognize your own power and privilege as well as supporting you in your identities and lived experience.
a quick fix. Equity work demands a practice of accountability, and we’ll do deep inward reflection as well as external growth.
instead, we:
nourish the human. I’ll offer you a trauma-sensitive lens and support you in the discipline of care this work requires.
recognize our own power in shaping and influencing the systems in which we live, work, and play — and practice wielding it well.
nurture a practice of joy. Equity work, at its core, is the creative reimagining of what could be. Let’s play!
the details
3 months. 10 sessions. $3000.
We start with a dedicated 90-minute session to take a deep dive into your big visions, our shared definitions, and our plan of action. Over our season together, we meet weekly, by zoom or by phone.
Our hourlong sessions cover all of it — from the practical details of designing, implementing, and evaluating your daily choices to the big visions of how you steward power with integrity throughout your life’s work. We’ll tackle the “hard” skills, like data, money, and project management — as well as the “soft” skills of communication and relational abundance. In between sessions, I’m available to you via Slack for ongoing cheerleading, moral support, and fierce but gentle accountability.
In the third month, we revisit those big visions to celebrate what you’ve accomplished. Equity work is an ongoing practice – some people choose to renew for another season, and others continue their practice on their own.
now what?
Let’s talk! Sign up for a free half-hour inquiry call here.
Not quite ready for a three-month container? Join the waitlist below for future announcements, or you can book me for a single advising session here.
If you’re ready to:
transform your work from the foundations
deepen a practice of self trust
develop your fluency with equity and inclusion
name and address harms when they happen
build protective and supportive boundaries
nurture your body and brain from the violences enacted by oppression
reckon with radical accountability
this work is for you.
icon credit the Noun Project