Service Descriptions

Support to system leaders to design and manage change under complex and uncertain conditions. 

Grounded in our resource on Adaptive Strategic Planning for Education Leaders (2024) we support you to:

• Center the experience of young people and communities as the driving force for strategic change

• Bring a humanizing approach to facilitating change that connects and bridges across identities, experiences and roles

• Cultivate anticipatory awareness of complex changes that will impact your work

• Build collective leadership to support implementation and sustain momentum.

This change management support is customized to each system's context and priorities, and may include a combination of strategic planning sessions, stakeholder engagement facilitation, implementation design workshops, progress monitoring and learning sessions, and coaching for leaders navigating complex change. Our approach ensures your team builds capacity to sustain adaptive practices beyond our direct engagement.

Self-paced learning for equity leadership development. Learn more.

For leaders charged with leading system-level initiatives or projects. Leading transformative change requires more than technical expertise—it demands facilitative skills to navigate complexity, build collective ownership, and sustain momentum across diverse actors in a system. Our support strengthens leaders’ capacity to guide groups through adaptive challenges.

Through this work, leaders receive targeted support in understanding and applying Essential Leadership Practices in areas such as:

• Meeting design and facilitation: Planning and leading meetings that generate meaningful dialogue, actionable decisions, and shared commitment rather than simply conveying information

• Navigating group dynamics: Reading and responding to interpersonal tensions, power dynamics, resistance, and conflict in ways that build rather than diminish trust and progress

• Team development and capacity building: Cultivating high-functioning teams by clarifying roles, establishing norms, and creating conditions for collaboration and collective problem-solving

• Coaching through complexity: 1:1 and small group coaching to think through challenges that do not have best practices or clear answers to draw upon, explore approaches to taking action, and reflect on progress and leadership moves in real time

• Managing change with intention: Frameworks and practices to sequence change efforts, communicate clearly about difficult topics, and maintain alignment across multiple actors in a system

• Building equitable processes: Integrating equity into how meetings are run, decisions are made, and voices are elevated throughout the change process

This development work is customized to each leader's context and may include a combination of individual coaching, facilitation support during key meetings or convenings, collaborative planning sessions, and reflection opportunities to strengthen facilitative leadership practice over time.

We facilitate Communities of Practice and Fellowships that center learning and adaptation alongside action to drive meaningful organizational change.

Too often, change initiatives focus solely on implementing a set program without learning from and adjusting strategies based on impact. While specific goals and outcomes are context-dependent, common aims for our Community of Practice facilitation include:

• Shared capacity building: Developing shared language, understanding, and increased will, skill, and knowledge to identify, disrupt, and address inequities

• Expanding lenses: Increasing members’ capacity to apply an equity equity and systems thinking lens to complex organizational leadership and cross-institutional challenges

• Shifting practice: Influencing shifts in members’ respective approaches, intentions, communications, and/or goals related to equity

• Cultivating authentic community: Cultivate relationships and utilize frameworks to develop a meaningful, authentic and robust learning community in which a commitment to learning, being and doing are expected; 

• Driving structural changes: Interrupt existing institutional dynamics/approaches through the formation of an intentional, change-centric community of practice. 

Communities of Practice may serve single or cross-sector institutional groups. Typically year-long, they bring together staff from various programs and departments who are embedded within a system or organization and committed to sustained learning and transformation.

In addition to our open-registration offerings, the National Equity Project provides customized professional development to districts and organizations that serve to:

• Renew your team's commitment to creating meaningful and lasting change

• Equip leaders with innovative skills, concepts and tools

• Catalyze fresh thinking and actionable strategies

Customized Institute and Learning Series include:

Leading for Equity

Our foundational leadership development experience helps participants develop inclusive leadership practices and create supportive environments for historically underserved communities. We focus on cultivating self-awareness, system understanding, and practical frameworks for improving collaborative relationships and building teams and alliances in diverse settings.

Coaching & Managing for Equity

Coaching skills help leaders become more effective. Develop and practice a refined approach to support colleagues in becoming better teachers, teammates, and leaders.

Designing & Facilitating Meetings For Equity

Learn to create collaborative experiences that move beyond task lists. Gain essential knowledge for setting conditions that enable productive discussions around challenging topics, along with facilitation skills to respond to group dynamics.

Liberatory Design for Equity

Learn an innovative approach combining human-centered design thinking with complexity awareness. Develop skills to lead change and create more inclusive teams, organizations, and systems that address current challenges while building foundations for long-term transformation.

Leading for Equity in Complex Systems

Strengthen your approach to leading complex change efforts by exploring complexity frameworks, reflecting on your own leadership, and developing skills to navigate complex work.

Sustainable change in student experience starts with district leadership teams who have the capacity, support, and strategic frameworks to move from insight to action. The National Equity Project's District Redesign Network (DRN) builds collective leadership capacity to transform how students experience school.

Through this two-year cohort experience (Fall 2026 to Spring 2028), district teams apply liberatory design cycles to:

• Ground redesign efforts in the lived experiences and aspirations of students and communities most impacted by inequity

• Build team practices for navigating complexity, surfacing assumptions, and making equity-centered decisions

• Learn from and with peer districts facing similar challenges and opportunities

• Design and test changes to systems, structures, and practices that shape daily student experience

• Develop internal capacity to sustain cycles of learning, action, and adaptation beyond the cohort

This network combines structured convenings, inter-sessional coaching and planning support, peer learning exchanges, and facilitated design cycles tailored to each district's context and goals. Districts leave equipped to continue transforming student experience through their own sustained leadership for equity.

Learn more and apply here.

For teachers and instructional leaders building equitable learning environments

Creating learning environments where every student experiences belonging and sees themselves reflected in the learning requires examining how identity, relationships, and learning conditions shape student experience. Our support strengthens educators' capacity to build equitable instructional practices grounded in student experience data and authentic partnership.

Through this work, classroom educators and coaches and instructional leaders receive targeted support in:

• Building cultures of belonging: Creating conditions where students experience authentic connection, see their identities affirmed, and engage as their whole selves in learning

• Using student experience data: Learning methods to gather, analyze, and act on what students are experiencing—through student voice, observation, and focal student approaches—to make instructional decisions responsive to student needs

• Developing learning partnerships: Understanding how identity, mindset, and learning conditions shape the student-teacher relationship, and building partnerships that center student humanity and promote both academic and social-emotional growth

• Implementing instructional frameworks: Embedding equity principles into the design and implementation of instructional approaches—such as Universal Design for Learning—to ensure frameworks serve all learners and disrupt inequitable patterns

• Engaging in collaborative inquiry: Participating in ongoing learning communities that use problems of practice, practical application, and reflection to deepen instructional routines and responsiveness to student learning

Support is customized to our partners’ unique context and may include a combination of professional learning sessions, collaborative inquiry groups, coaching, and structured opportunities to strengthen instructional practice over time.

Intentional collaborative work to design or redesign elements of your system to change experiences and outcomes.

Sustainable, equitable change doesn't come from implementing predetermined solutions—it emerges from understanding the system as it operates, learning alongside those within it, and co-designing approaches. Our System Design/Redesign work supports organizations, institutions, and cross-sector collaboratives that are ready to fundamentally rethink their practices, common ways of working, policies, organizational structures, programs, and the overall design of schools and educational systems. how they operate, serve, and create impact.

This work is adaptive and responsive, meeting partners where they are in their change journey. Rooted in our Liberatory Design approach, We develop strategies—not rigid plans—that allow for iteration, learning, and course correction as conditions shift and new insights emerge. Our approach centers:

• Grounding in data and lived experience:  Gathering and analyzing qualitative and quantitative data that reveals how the current system functions, who it serves well, who it marginalizes, and where leverage points for change exist

• Learning as design:  Treating the design process itself as an opportunity for stakeholders to develop shared understanding, challenge assumptions, and build capacity for systems thinking

• Inclusive stakeholder engagement:  Collaborating with a diverse group of interest holders—including those most impacted by inequities—to ensure that multiple perspectives, experiences, and forms of expertise shape the redesign

• Addressing complexity:  Developing approaches and solutions that account for the interconnected, dynamic, and often unpredictable nature of complex systems rather than applying linear, one-size-fits-all fixes

• Centering equity: Designing for a more just and inclusive system or collective effort by interrogating power dynamics, resource distribution, decision-making structures, and whose voices and needs have been historically centered or marginalized

• Building adaptive capacity: Creating conditions and structures that enable the system to continue learning, adjusting, and evolving beyond the initial redesign phase

System Design/Redesign initiatives are collaborative, iterative processes that may include stakeholder analysis and engagement, systems mapping, root cause analysis, scenario planning, prototyping new approaches, and establishing feedback loops to monitor impact and inform ongoing adjustments. The timeline and scope are tailored to the scale and complexity of what is being redesigned—whether it's an internal organizational structure, a cross-institutional initiative, or a community-wide collaborative effort.

Open-registration professional development events online and in person California and the Midwest. Learn more.