Re/alignment RETREATS
Guided teamwork to help define & realign your values and operations
Re/Alignment is an action-oriented, introspective retreat for teams new and old alike. Combining strategic planning, time-traveling, real talk, and accountability exercises, we guide you through a care-filled, collective process of curiosity, consideration, dreaming, and doing to help your team (re)align what you practice and what you preach. This work is not just about making sure we’re aligned in our “external” work (when we do whatever it is we do for our communities), but that we’re walking the talk internally, within our teams and internal dynamics, too. By the end of our time together, you’ll have collaboratively regrounded the who, why, and how of your work, identified what shifts you need to make to (re)align your intentions with your impact in both the short and long term, and co-created a plan to help you follow through with what we created together.
By the end of our Re/Alignment together, you and yours will have collaboratively…
regrounded the who, why, and how of your work
identified what shifts you need to make to (re)align your intentions with your impact, and what new possibilities open as you do so
co-created an action plan that includes accountability to help you follow through in applying, maintaining, and evolving the shifts we created together
planted the seed of your future rituals to help you maintain a rhythm of reflection, action, and (re)alignment over time
Teams often set their vision and values at the foundation of their time together, marking the shared purpose of their work. However, as time goes on, the pressures of daily operations, funding, deadlines, navigating relationships with other groups, and more can cause our purpose and our operations to drift apart. In the background, driving this drift and divide, is the greater context of the racist, capitalist system that we all work within — a system that is inherently exploitative and which generates particular patterns of labor, relationship, and imbalanced power dynamics that need to be consciously interrupted. To do work that not only resists these patterns but lives into futures beyond them, we need ongoing work rituals of reflection and accountability that call what we believe, what we do, how we do it, and who we’re doing it with and for back into alignment.
We offer this retreat as an aid to you and your team in the creation of your own rituals to call yourselves home and into account. Whether you’re a new collective, worker co-operative, or team setting your foundation for the first time or an established group seeking to recenter yourselves after time, change, or strain, this retreat is for you.
Re/alignment is available as a 3 to 5 day** retreat, though we can break out half and full day modules upon request.
**To adapt to zoom and survival fatigue during the COVID-19 pandemic, if conducted online, we may spread out “day” equivalents over several days. In-person retreats are considered on a case-by-case basis and include strict COVID protocols.
Rate set on a sliding scale depending on length, organizational budget, circumstance, and the complexity of your needs. We’ll go over the details when you book! To book, hit the button to right and fill out our quick interest form.
“Build With helped me to design an equitable worker co-op around the idea of social-justice-oriented software development. We sat down and over the course of a handful of engagements Laurenellen helped me (and later both myself and my business partner) to design what a co-operative business looked like that reflected the values that I wanted to reflect and avoided the pitfalls I’d experienced in my past work. We came away with a framework and a set of seed documents that continue to inform how we work together and how we approach the work that we do.
The co-op that we designed together continues to be my primary job years later, and has successfully worked on many different projects that have a positive impact on the communities we work with. The documents and framing that we created with Build With continue to be the guiding light for the work that we do, and our first reference point for how we approach any new challenges.”
“Build With as an organization PUSHES people, and refuses to let people get stuck in places that reinforce stagnation and maintaining the status quo. My experience with Build With with Throneless was a lot of care, listening, and beautiful planning for a strong, thought-out, and bright beginning [for our cooperative]...Build With offers spaciousness for engaging in hard conversations while also making sure they stay on track and focused.”