Whitney Benns
Facilitator | EDUCATOR | COACH | Emotional Labor Organizer
WoRK & Approach
Whitney (she/her) is a facilitator for movement organizations and collectives building power and accountable community, helping them tap into the potential of generative conflict, honest communication, and fugitive strategy. She works with clients across sectors, but focuses on supporting social justice advocates, organizers and their funders, and educators and school leaders. You can learn more about Whitney’s background and philosophy behind her work in this interview published in ABA Magazine’s section of Dispute Resolution.
As an educator, Whitney serves as a Lecturer on Law at the Harvard Law School and Lecturer on Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She teaches the Negotiation Workshop and Fugitive Negotiation: Negotiating Power, Space, and Purpose with/in Institutions, which is the focus of her writing and research. Whitney also writes about the intersections of labor, unions, and the carceral state.
As a coach, Whitney takes an emergent approach, helping leaders move through the moments, conflicts, and decisions they find difficult by connecting themes and creating space for deep reflection and ideas for experimentation. She supports her clients in the ways they want (and need) to grow, and helps them feel through, practice, and think strategically about relationships, experiences, and challenges from a place of care and push.
Whitney received her B.S. in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Utah, and her J.D. from Harvard Law School. She is trained in emergent strategy facilitation, structural dynamics, family systems, dispute systems design, and mediation. She was born and raised in a valley within the Rocky Mountains, and now splits her time between St. Louis, Missouri and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Vision
I believe the imperative for human beings alive at this time is to mindfully and heartfully engage in the work of figuring out how to be together, here on this planet, in our communities, in our workplaces, and in our homes. How we can understand and move towards meeting our needs and desires and take seriously the needs and desires of others. We have many old tools and frameworks for how to do this in ways that are manipulative, oppressive, reductive, rigid, and erasing. All stem from a logic of scarcity, power domination, and fear. We also have many old and new frames, practices and ideas for how we might work to hold our individual and collective desires with more curiosity, care, creativity, and abundance. And, while brighter and much nicer sounding, choosing that path and that place of practice is not easy or always clear. I ground my work from this place, in my own relationships and in my teaching and my consulting practice where I accompany and seek to be a resource to others.
offerings
FACILITATING WORKSHOPS
I design and facilitate reflective & skills-based learning experiences, tailoring interactive workshops to help people grow and shift in their relationships. Even when we are working hard and want to have the important conversations in our lives, we can get stuck. My workshops cover a range of topics and skills, from handling difficult conversations, effectively giving and receiving feedback, cultivating accountability in our relationships with others and ourselves, negotiation skills, and moving through conflict.
COACHING Leaders & Teams
I offer 1:1 coaching to leaders across a range of levels. I also coach team members and facilitate team conversations to catalyze connection, experimentation, and alignment. I hold space for teams to talk about how they work together - what it looks like, the meaning they make of it, and how it feels. I notice team patterns so that the team can attend to them - supporting teams in shifting collective practices where desired.
HOLDING CONFLICT
I hold space for relational conflict, communication, exploration, and change. I help groups understand pain points in collective and connected relationships. I support the work of understanding the complex layers of shared and separate experiences and perspectives that shape what is hard between people, and provide space for possible experiments, agreements, alternative norms. I aim to support an experience of conflict that is generative and learningful.
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