Now offering dynamic virtual graphic facilitation & virtual meeting design support.

Visualizing Change

Visualizing ChangeVisualizing ChangeVisualizing Change
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    • Contact Us

Visualizing Change

Visualizing ChangeVisualizing ChangeVisualizing Change
  • Home
  • Services
  • Workshops & Training
  • Portfolio
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

About Us

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Vision to Action

Customized Services

Vision to Action

At Visualizing Change we tackle pervasive social issues by facilitating environments that enable changemakers to visualize innovative solutions to problems and experiment with doable actions with enduring results. 

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Co-creation

Customized Services

Vision to Action

We partner with organizational change makers, consultants, and innovators to help groups see the changes they wish to manifest, synthesize complex ideas, and solve problems. 

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Customized Services

Customized Services

Customized Services

We work with you to tailor services that meet your unique needs - whether that's by facilitating a team discovery and design process to generate innovative solutions, providing graphic facilitation at retreats and conferences, or providing wrap-around support and technical assistance.

Our Approach

Center those directly impacted

Interdisciplinary & intersectional

Interdisciplinary & intersectional

We believe transformative, sustainable change begins with centering those most impacted. We approach solutions with a co-design mindset, collaborating in designing solutions with those who understand the problem through direct experience.

Interdisciplinary & intersectional

Interdisciplinary & intersectional

Interdisciplinary & intersectional

We see that pervasive social and ecological issues result from inequitable systems of oppression and violence. Our interdisciplinary approach examines problems and seeks holistic, sustainable solutions at the intersections of social, ecological, and economic justice.

Emergent & iterative design

Interdisciplinary & intersectional

Emergent & iterative design

We know that change happens iteratively and evolves within emergent contexts. We love to practice designing and testing our ideas in steps that centers a learning mindset so that we make informed adjustments for more powerful and sustainable impact. 

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Our Team

Chandra Larsen

Founder, Visualizing Change 

Organizational transformation specialist, graphic facilitator, personal transformational coach

  

Chandra (she/her/they) uses the power of art and creativity to ignite transformative experiences for people and organizations. For over 20 years, she has worked with people committed to tackling pervasive social issues resulting from systems of oppression and violence. She specializes in facilitating people and groups with visualizing bold strategies for a just society, personal and collective liberation, and nourishing thriving ecosystems. Chandra and her collaborators at Visualizing Change facilitate environments that enable changemakers to visualize innovative solutions to problems and experiment with doable actions with enduring results. 


Drawing from early years of working with children and youth in alternative learning environments, Chandra has worked with many layers of social ecosystems – from local organizations to federal government agencies. She founded Visualizing Change in 2017 to help individuals and organizations explore personal and collective strategies for transforming toxic beliefs, behaviors, and structures rooted in white supremacy and patriarchy as it plays out and is reinforced within dominant culture. 


Most recently, Chandra has deepened her practice in working with white-identified individuals and teams within organizations to address the harm of racial inequality - the impact on people of color as well as on white people. Within communities of practice we are exploring personal and collective strategies for transforming toxic beliefs, behaviors, and structures of white conditioning and privilege as it plays out and is reinforced within dominant culture. 


Chandra earned a Master's in Interdisciplinary Studies with an emphasis on Educational Policy and Transformation in the Hutchin's School Action for a Viable Future program at Sonoma State. As an undergrad, she earned a B.A. in Women's and Gender Studies and a B.A. in Liberal Studies from the Hutchins School of Liberal Studies from Sonoma State. She has engaged in deep learning and practice with graphic facilitation, transforamtional consulting and coaching, Forward Stance, Human Centered Design/Design Thinking and Liberating Structures - all of which deeply inform her facilitative approach.


Chandra is a loving mother of a young son, who is nurtured and loved along with her dear life and business partner. In her free time, she loves hiking in the redwoods, gardening, making magical tinctures, and cooking dinner while watching Chopped.

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Trace Elms

Technical assistance specialist, transformational coach

Trace has helped people make profound changes in their work and lives for over 30 years. Blending his talents as a musician and holistic-thinker, Trace (he/him) synthesizes and weaves complexities into organized, strategic steps that come together like a song. He improved systems and services within the private sector until the early 2000s. He has since pivoted to dedicate his talents, social justice lens and convictions to organizations fighting for people on the margins providing research, evaluation, capacity building and technical assistance to state and national initiatives focused on system and service reform. He is currently deepening his practice in transformational coaching with a Leadership that Works certification and specializes in visual virtual meetings and event management.

COLLABORATORS

Susan Misra

Principle, Aurora Commons

Susan Misra’s life purpose is to work with advocates and activists to actualize their visions and values of justice and equity in their relationships, structures, and work today. She has over 20 years of experience in developing equitable, sustainable organizations and networks for movement building. For funders, Susan has designed, managed, and evaluated capacity building and grantmaking initiatives on a range of topics such as strengthening senior leadership and fundraising of grassroots organizations, diversifying audiences and increasing the financial resilience of arts organizations, and developing equitable and sustainable business models for intermediaries. For nonprofits, Susan has worked with over 250 organizations and networks on complex strategic planning, leadership development (including executive coaching, shared leadership, leadership teams, and board development), organizational restructuring and culture change, and financial sustainability. For both funders and nonprofits, Susan leads inclusive, participatory, and analytically rigorous processes.


Susan received a Master’s in Public Policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a B.S. in Psychology from Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She has been trained in transformational consulting, emergent and peer coaching, and diversity and equity facilitation. When not working, you can find Susan volunteering her time on local economic justice and political campaigns and reading revolutionary young adult fiction.

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Lesli LeGras Morris

Director, Los Angeles Reproductive Health Equity Project for Foster Youth

Board Member, Parenting for Liberation

Fellow, John W. Mack Movement Building Fellows Program 

For nearly two decades, Lesli LeGras Morris (she/her/hers) has worked with a variety of community based organizations, community development corporations, coalitions, & networks to design innovative & community-driven programming that galvanizes collective commitment to promoting equity & justice for young people of Color in Los Angeles & the Bay Area, with a particular focus on youth impacted by the foster care system, probation, and homelessness. An experienced facilitator & "container creator," Lesli has a strong intersectional lens that supports groups to fully live into their values while grappling with the nuances of movement building work and complex systems change to encourage them to take the risks necessary to spark social justice. Lesli's passion is driven by her lived experiences as a Black womxn, proud born-and-bred resident of South Central Los Angeles, and mama to two boys who embody #blackboyjoy. 

Ada Palotai

Co-founder, The StarLion Collective

Ada Palotai (she/they) is a queer, mixed race woman of color, an artist,  healer and Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner, exploring embodiment  practices as vehicles for individual and collective healing,  transformation and liberation. With nearly 20 years of experience in  facilitation and training, and programs and organizational development,  she has a strong community organizing and public health orientation with  deep expertise in supporting multi-disciplinary teams, complex systems  and diverse and diasporic communities to move in alignment toward a  common vision. Rooted in the magic of collaboration and network weaving,  Ada builds bridges in and brings a sharp power analysis to her work at  the intersections -- of violence prevention and racial justice, of  organizations and organizers, and of the scientific and the sacred. In her free time, Ada loves to play with her dogs, be with human loved ones, and experiment with fashion.

Molly Wertz

Principal, Molly Wertz Consulting

Molly Wertz is a seasoned social sector leader who uses her deep grounding in relationship and faith in the power of the human spirit to inspire teams and individuals to bring their most authentic selves to their mission toward a more just society. For over 30 years, she has dedicated herself to addressing inequities in opportunity and disparate outcomes for marginalized people as an educator, philanthropy professional and non-profit leader. She is known for creating spaces where participant and client voices inform programs and practices, while staff and leadership embrace both high standards and deep connection. As Founder of Tandem, Partners in Early Learning, Molly fostered broad collaboration with policy makers, advocates, families, and ECE providers, to build an equity-focused and impactful capacity building organization fully leveraged within the Bay Area early childhood education arena. Across her career, her authentic and values-driven leadership and facilitation has led to deeply engaged co-investors, effective and reflective program leaders, and inspired cross-sector collaboratives in education, youth development, financial stability, and workforce development. Known for her strategic acumen and inspirational drive, Molly is a sought-after consultant for non-profit executives seeking a thought-partner and leadership coach to support them in accomplishing their professional and organizational goals. Molly is a delighted grandmother, a loving partner, a compassionate caregiver, and an emerging fiber artist.

APPRENTICESHIP PROGRAM

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Expanding BIPOC & queer representation & practice

Visualizing Change is committed to expanding representation and inclusion of historically underrepresented people within the field of visual facilitation and in our work. Like most professional industries, graphic facilitation and recording is predominantly practiced by white and light-skinned practitioners who come from European cultures and backgrounds, and often work with clients within the corporate sector.  Our team sees this is as a deficit to our field of work, and as such dedicate our practice to collaborating with and supporting the development of underrepresented communities - especially, Black, Indigenous, Queer, Asian, Latinx, mixed race, multi-lingual, and/or atypically-abled people.


At Visualizing Change, we have dedicated our practice to working with organizations and groups on projects that are reflective of our core values - social and environmental justice, racial and gender equity and justice, and transformative movement building. While each member of our collaborative is aligned in their own ways with these values, we recognize that each visual facilitator brings a subjective experience to their craft. This is why diversifying the field of visual recording and facilitation is a powerful commitment to our collective.


As such, our group is committed to collaborating with emergent graphic facilitators as apprentices and collaborators - especially those with lived experiences and identities that are underrepresented and deeply desired to be represented in our work with groups.  


In 2018, Visualizing Change began collaborating with emergent, practicing graphic recorders and facilitators in our work. We are always eager to find projects where we might cultivate opportunities for their practice in a community of coaching and support.  See our team page for a list of some of our primary collaborators in this work.  


Contact us to learn more about our apprenticeship program.

Contact Us

Client list

  

American Civil Liberties Union

Arab Resource and Organizing Center

Asian Pacific Institute of Gender-Based Violence

Bay Rising

Californians for Justice

Change Elemental (formerly Management Assistance Group)

Citizen’s Engagement Lab

Community Partners

CoreAlign

CultureStrike

Early Learning Lab

East Los Angeles College

Electronic Frontier Foundation

Ford Foundation

Futures without Violence

Levi Strauss Foundation

Movement Strategy Center

Move to End Violence

Mujeres Unidas y Activas

National Immigrant Law Center

New Left Accelerator

Partners for Collaborative Change

Social Movements + Innovation

Social Policy Research Associates

Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation

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