Transformational Leadership

Exploring Power, Privilege and Tools for Change

This 2½-day, in-person immersion retreat (or 5-day virtual training, 4 hours per day) engages environmental leaders with a thirst for bringing their change work to the next level. This course is ideal for individuals with a solid base of understanding barriers to inclusion and equity. Participants examine the role of power, privilege, and advantage in their lives, their work and the larger environmental movement. They emerge with new tools for identifying action-based solutions at the individual and interpersonal, organizational and systems, and movement-wide levels.

While this course is open enrollment, participants should arrive with a foundation in diversity work. This means being open, willing and ready to talk about the personal and systemic implications of power, advantage and privilege, and how they are informed by race and white supremacy culture. Participants should have a genuine desire to deepen their understanding of power and privilege as they play out in their own lives and in the history of the environmental movement and, from there, be willing to step into sincerity and vulnerability. The conversation will go as deep as the cohort will let it, and the outcomes will be proportional to the level of openness each person brings.

Participants will:

  • Investigate multicultural organizational development models
  • Refine skills and develop new tools for action-based solutions at individual and interpersonal levels, systems and organizational levels, and movement levels
  • Deeply explore individual ways of seeing and being in the world
  • Bravely examine the role of power, advantage and privilege
  • Understand the implications and impacts of colonization and dominant culture
  • Examine and develop analysis for culture change rooted in equity, diversity, inclusion and justice
  • Develop and/or refine personal and organizational “why” statements
  • Develop action plans to put tools into practice and lead change in their spheres of influence

All Programs

Building the Foundation

An entry-point for individuals just starting out or wishing to strengthen the foundation of their equity work

Exploring Power, Privilege and Tools for Change

An intermediate course for individuals ready to take their equity work to the next level of action

Environment 2042 Leadership Program

A multi-month immersive leadership development program for individuals well-along in their equity work

The Inner Work

Courses designed for community connection and healing

Decoding Whiteness

A course for people in the environmental movement to identify, name and dismantle patterns of white supremacy in their lives and work

Leadership Coaching & Consulting

CDE offers leadership coaching and consulting services to individual clients who have taken part in foundational work with us.

Contact Us