Organizational Healing & Liberation
Let’s be thought partners.
More than ever, it is necessary for organizations to deepen their capacity to embrace diversity, build inclusive workplaces, and promote equity in their community impact. But traditional Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI or DEIJ) curriculums sometimes fall short in addressing shame culture that can paralyze organizations and perpetuate oppressive behaviors in performativity of “wokeness”.
At Healing as Resistance, we center healing, compassion, nonviolence, and anti-shame culture. We cultivate brave learning spaces for everyone to be imperfect and to grow, no matter where they are in their JEDI journey. We work with government, non-profit, academic, and private groups that have a social mission, who are seeking to cultivate organizational cultural transformation around healing and liberation and create more equitable community impact. We offer:
Thought partnership (consulting)
Training and workshop design and facilitation
Staff retreat design and facilitation
Executive and leadership coaching
Assessments and strategic planning
Action plan creation
Resource tool development
and more!
Our Core Values
Our approach is one that is rooted in compassion, nonviolence, and anti-shame culture. We cultivate brave, perfection-free learning spaces for everyone to grow, no matter where they are in their JEDI journey.
At Healing as Resistance, we live out various equity and liberation principles in our day-to-day practice. The following are core values that inform our unique approach to this work:
Centering Historically Marginalized Groups. We believe in valuing each voice in the room, while centering those who have been marginalized throughout history. The most marginalized groups, particularly those with layered and intersecting marginalized identities, often hold the answers to our most complex social problems. We believe liberating historically marginalized groups is key to liberating everyone.
Moving at the Speed of Trust. We strive for true partnership with our clients, rather than posing as top-down experts. We believe in transparency, direct communication, collaborative decision-making, and cultivating joy. We move at the speed of trust because the relationship and process are critical to the outcome. Efficiency is not about how quickly we arrive at change, but how transformative change can endure.
Nonviolence & Radical Compassion. We create spaces that are learning-oriented so that all of us can receive patience, compassion, and room to make mistakes and learn from them. We recognize oppression has caused real harm and trauma for generations. We believe in accountability for this harm, while also condoning shame culture and carceral approaches. We value fostering compassionate, brave, perfection-free, and deeply accountable growth-oriented spaces by principles of restorative justice and Kingean nonviolence.
Somatic & Trauma-Informed. We acknowledge that our bodies, minds, and spirit are interconnected, and each being has a richly complex nervous system that has been impacted by systems of oppression. We believe what's inside affects what happens on the outside. We value creating space to check in with our bodies and approach this work through a trauma-informed lens. Our goal is to help create cultures, policies, and practices that help to build self-awareness, reduce trauma triggers, and promote a sense of safety, connection, belonging, and joy, for all– for each other and the communities we aim to serve.
"Our movements themselves have to be healing, or else there's no point."
— Cara Page
Specialty Topics
Understanding systems of oppression
How did we get here? US history of race, gender, place and space
Racial justice, anti-racism, and anti-oppression
Gender expansiveness & gender equity
Power, privilege, oppression
Unconscious bias & internalized -isms
Intersectionality
Creating more equitable community impact
Culturally responsive & trauma-informed community engagement
Working with low-income communities of color and immigrant communities
Working beyond the gender binary
Participatory planning and design
Comprehensive neighborhood planning, housing, and community economic development
Racial and social justice in policy-making
Transforming workplace / organizational culture
Team development and community-building
Recruiting & retaining diversity in the workplace
De-centering whiteness at work
Truth, reconciliation, and healing
Generative conflict & non-violent communication
Operationalizing JEDI principles
Building trauma-informed approaches
Creating spaces of belonging for all
and more!
Informed by Real Life Experience
G’s expertise around JEDI work is informed by their decade of award-winning professional experience implementing racial/social equity and cultural competency-building in the urban planning and community development fields, as well as their personal lived experience as a person of multiple marginalized identities.
Giovania has over a decade of direct experience designing and executing participatory planning with low-income communities of color in the non-profit and public sectors. They most recently served as Deputy Director of Neighborhood Planning at the NYC Housing Preservation and Development in the Office of Neighborhood Strategies. There, Giovania managed several high-profile initiatives, including The Brownsville Plan and Where We Live NYC, the City's comprehensive fair housing initiative. Turing their tenure, they designed and led over 50 large-scale community workshops and hundreds of community meetings across four boroughs, engaging thousands of New Yorkers of various racial/ethnic, gender, sexual, religious, national, and economic backgrounds and abilities. They transformed the way the agency and the City engaged residents with their neighborhoods and housing policies.
Alongside this community development work, G has served as an industry consultant and nation-wide advocate for racial and social justice, helping to build cultural competency of non-profit, public, and private companies. They are nationally recognized for “Elephant in the Planning Room” their participatory-research graduate thesis on overcoming barriers to recruitment, retention, and advancement of people of color in the planning and policy fields. Their work has been featured at the American Planning Association National Planning Conference, the GovLove Podcast, and more. Between 2015-2020, Giovania co-founded and co-chaired the Diversity Committee (DivComm) of the American Planning Association New York Metro Chapter, and was a co-founder and lead organizer for the annual Hindsight Conference, a conference on urban planning through an equity lens. Since then, G has worked more formally as a consultat in DEI, supporting the planning, architecture, community development, and a variety of other industries such including arts, higher education, fitness, and more.
The roots of G’s attunement to the various needs in communities and creativity around JEDI strategies are largely informed by their lived experience as a queer, trans non-binary person of color, who grew up in a working class immigrant household in various cities across the U.S. and all around the world. They witnessed and navigated systems of oppression around the world, seeing the parallel roots of racial/ethnic and gender violence as it relates power and belonging. Since a very young age, G has been passionate about building bridges of understanding and belonging across cultures and identities, and this passion continues today.
Giovania holds an M.S. in City and Regional Planning from Pratt Institute, and a B.A. in Sociology with a focus on Race and Globalization from Dickinson.
“I absolutely loved working with G! Their unique style of coaching combines profound compassion with accountability that encourages constant self-reflection followed by intentional action. I feel I have come out of our sessions a stronger, more confident and centered leader with a clearer vision for the work that needs to be done to achieve our organization's mission as well as my own personal and professional goals.”
Janette, Habitat for Humanity affiliate
Testimonials
“When it comes to diversity, Giovania is the most powerful voice I have heard in a generation. Their message and insights about diversity are refreshing and will change the way you think. It changed the way I think."
Mitchell Silver, Former NYC Parks Commissioner
“Our organization has had DEI efforts for a few years, but tonight I felt the most progress in my own personal anti-racist journey."
Anonymous workshop participant
Sample Past Projects
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Where We Live NYC
New York City’s comprehensive fair housing planning process to confront segregation and advance opportunity for all.
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The Brownsville Plan
Community-driven process in Brownsville to identify neighborhood goals, create strategies to address local needs, and find resources to fill gaps in service.
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Community Visioning Workshops
Community workshops across New York City neighborhoods to engage residents on their vision for the development of publically owned sites into affordable housing and community amenities.
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The Hindsight Conference
An annual conference on urban planning through an equity lens (2017-2021).
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Anti-Racism Training Modules & Equity Tools
A series of resources created for Habitat for Humanity International and affiliates, including training modules, guides on applying equity into quality of life, DEI strategic planning, and engaging communities of color in culturally relevant and trauma-informed ways.
