The Shift

The Shift is a 5-day experiential training where teams strengthen trust, collaboration, and shared leadership. Through dialogue, relational practices, and play, organizations explore ways of working together that align with their deepest values.

A relational leadership and culture-building experience for teams working with young people

Organizations working for youth empowerment often carry a powerful vision: equity, belonging, agency, and justice.

Many teams eventually begin asking an important question:

How do we create internal cultures that truly reflect the values we want young people to experience?

The relationships between adults inside an organization shape everything — how decisions are made, how conflict is navigated, how creativity emerges, and how safe people feel bringing their ideas, perspectives, and leadership forward.

The Shift is an experiential process that helps teams build cultures of trust, connection, and shared leadership so the way adults work together reflects the world they want young people to grow up in.

Radical Learning

Why This Matters for Youth-Serving Organizations

Young people don’t just experience programs.

They experience culture.

They feel it in the way adults communicate with each other, how decisions are made, how conflict is navigated, and whether creativity, voice, and agency are truly welcomed.

When teams operate from:

  • trust rather than control

  • collaboration rather than hierarchy

  • consent rather than compliance

  • curiosity rather than judgment

  • connection rather than urgency


…the entire environment changes.

The Shift helps teams align their internal culture with the values they want young people to experience every day.

At the heart of The Shift is a simple belief:

Healthy cultures are built through relationship.

Through connection, trust, curiosity, shared learning, and the space to explore new ways of being together.

The Shift invites teams to slow down, reconnect with one another, and strengthen the relational foundations that allow people and organizations to thrive.

Radical Learning

What The Shift Supports

The Shift is a facilitated experience designed to help teams strengthen the relational foundations that support healthy and sustainable collaboration.

Deepening relationships within the team
Create space for authentic connection, trust-building, and understanding across roles.

Strengthening relational leadership
Explore leadership practices that invite shared responsibility, collaboration, and distributed leadership.

Building healthier communication patterns
Learn tools that support honest dialogue, deep listening, and navigating tension in constructive ways.

Recognizing patterns of power and inherited organizational habits
Develop awareness of how broader systems shape the ways we interact and lead, and explore alternatives rooted in equity, agency, and shared responsibility.

Reconnecting with creativity, play, and curiosity
Play is not separate from meaningful work — it is one of the ways humans build trust, connection, and innovation.

The Shift creates space for teams to reconnect with curiosity, creativity, and joy as essential ingredients of sustainable collaboration.

radical learning

Practices and Frameworks We Work With

The Shift brings together relational and experiential practices that support teams in building trust, connection, and shared leadership.

These include:

  • Decolonized Nonviolent Communication (DNVC)

  • Tools for expressing needs, listening deeply, and navigating conflict with clarity and care.

  • Consent-based collaboration practices

  • Approaches that support autonomy, agency, and shared decision-making within teams.

  • Resonance practices for relational attunement

  • Guided practices that help participants slow down, tune into themselves and one another, and strengthen the capacity for empathy, presence, and authentic connection.

  • Agile learning and adaptive leadership tools

  • Practices that support flexibility, shared leadership, and responsive decision-making.

  • Culture creation frameworks

  • Tools for intentionally shaping the relational culture of a team.

  • Play-based and embodied learning experiences

  • Activities that build trust, creativity, and connection while allowing teams to explore new ways of relating.

  • Practices for understanding power and systems

  • Reflective tools that help teams recognize inherited dynamics and explore more equitable ways of working together.

This is not a lecture-based training.

The Shift is an interactive and experiential process where participants actively practice new ways of relating, communicating, and collaborating.

Connection, reflection, dialogue, and play
are all part of the process.

What Teams Often Experience

Organizations that participate in The Shift often report:

  • stronger trust within the team

  • clearer communication across roles

  • more collaborative leadership dynamics

  • deeper connection and understanding between team members

  • greater alignment between mission and internal culture

  • renewed creativity, energy, and shared purpose

Rather than simply learning new tools, teams begin experiencing a different way of working together.

  • "The Shift was one of the most powerful professional and personal development experiences I’ve had. It expanded my awareness of how I show up in relationships and leadership, and gave me tools for communicating needs, navigating conflict, and supporting others with greater empathy and clarity. Since returning to my work, I’ve felt more grounded, more collaborative, and more capable of holding space for meaningful dialogue and growth."

    Jessica

  • "The Shift offered a series of gentle invitations to examine our beliefs, the systems that shaped them, and how they influence the way we show up in our work and relationships. Through conversation, reflection, and playful practices, we explored tools that helped us respond differently in moments of tension and complexity. The experience strengthened my ability to listen deeply, navigate power dynamics, and collaborate with others in more compassionate and constructive ways."

    Leila

  • "The Shift was unlike any training or conference I’ve attended in over 20 years. Instead of lectures or presentations about leadership and culture, we actually lived and practiced the principles together. The facilitators created a space where people could show up fully, explore deeply held assumptions, and learn from one another without fear of judgment. It was a powerful reminder that real learning and culture change happen through experience and relationship, not just information."

    Chemay

Who Holds the Space

The Shift is facilitated by Sari González, Chemay Morales-James, and Rebecka Koritz.

Sari and Rebecka, co-founders of Radical Learning and creators of The Shift, have spent years supporting families, educators, and learning communities in moving beyond control-based systems toward cultures rooted in trust, consent, and collaboration.

Their work focuses on helping adults transform the ways they relate to and support young people, while building environments where autonomy, agency, and connection can thrive.

Chemay brings extensive experience in culturally responsive education, facilitation, and equity-centered learning design. Her work focuses on helping individuals and organizations engage complex conversations while building clarity, connection, and shared purpose.

Together, they create spaces where teams can pause, reflect, and practice new ways of relating and leading — aligning their internal culture with the values they seek to embody in their work with young people.

If you’re curious about bringing this work into your organization, we’d love to hear from you.

Fill out the form below and tell us a bit about your context. We’ll get back to you to schedule a conversation and see if this feels like a good match — for you and for us.

Let’s explore if this is a fit

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