Tuesday, December 3, 2024

9:30am-4:00pm PST

Tuesday, September 10, 2024

9:30am-4:00pm PST

We are all living in challenging times that our past experience and training has not sufficiently prepared us for. Too often, well intentioned equity efforts do not succeed—and even produce unintended consequences. This can lead to frustration, hopelessness and cynicism. This workshop offers an introduction to our Liberatory Design approach.

Liberatory Design is an approach to addressing equity challenges and change efforts in complex systems. It is a process and practice to:

• Create designs that help interrupt inequity and increase opportunity for those most impacted by oppression

• Transform power by shifting the relationships between those who hold power to design and those impacted by these designs

• Generate critical learning and increased agency for those involved in the design work  

At the core of Liberatory Design are a set of beliefs: racism and inequity have been designed into systems and thus can be designed out of systems; designing for equity requires the meaningful participation of those impacted by inequity; and equity-driven designs require equity and complexity informed processes.

The Liberatory Design approach and card deck was originally created as part of a collaboration between the National Equity Project (Victor Cary and Tom Malarkey) and the Stanford d.school's K12 Lab (Tania Anaissie, David Clifford, and Susie Wise) in 2016. Our approach to Liberatory Design is grounded in our Leading for Equity Framework and integrates human-centered design (aka design thinking) with complex systems theory and deep equity practice.

”Great introduction to Liberatory Design. It feels richer and deeper than other design processes you may be familiar with and the community of practitioners is so wonderfully diverse and inspiring. Jump in!”

– Holly Morris, CEO/Founder, Global Voice Community

"I came away from this workshop with a better understanding of the complexities involved in equity work, a wealth of strategies - both taught and modeled - to immediately employ, and a greater feeling of inspiration for this work, mostly coming from the incredible community that joined together for this workshop."

– Amelia Lombard, Educator/Learning & Development professional

“I highly recommend this workshop for anyone involved in creating, designing, and/or evaluating programs, initiatives, or systems. This workshop has provided me with a model and the words necessary to reflect on my personal experiences and biases and to ensure that any design work I engage in is a collaborative, reflective, and empathetic process. This workshop has allowed me to start thinking about how to operationalize transformational work and the shifting of power to underrepresented communities.”

– Kassi Longoria, Principal Consultant, MAYA Consulting