Relational Fieldwork creates professional training and practice environments for people who hold groups, shape learning spaces, or take seriously how power moves through everyday participation.

Many people who find this work already hold strong values around justice, care, and relational integrity.

And still, inside meetings, classrooms, collectives, therapy rooms, and organizations, they notice themselves:

• stepping in too quickly
• carrying responsibility that was never assigned
• smoothing tension that needed time
• shaping outcomes without meaning to
• keeping groups coherent at personal cost

Not because they lack skill.
Not because they lack ethics.

Because power organizes participation faster than intention can. Most of us learned these participation habits long before we had language for them.

Systems reproduce through everyday participation habits. That means they can be interrupted there, too.

What This Work Trains

Relational Fieldwork is professional training in how participation patterns shape power, responsibility, and what becomes possible inside groups.

Participants do not primarily learn techniques or communication strategies.

They practice inside structured live group laboratories where participation dynamics become visible while they are happening.

Participants begin noticing:

• where they intervene too early
• where care turns into control
• where authority concentrates without consent
• where silence becomes disappearance
• where restraint opens new relational possibility

Over time, practitioners expand their range of ethical participation under pressure.

Participants often describe shifts like this:

“Our weekly classes affirmed the importance of working with uncertainty. They highlighted the value of collaborative space as a place for sharing and exploring unformed thoughts and reflections. I am learning to embrace moments of stillness, absence, and tenderness. My learning edge lies in letting go, getting lost, and allowing the material to lead.”
- Julia Tribe, Expressive Arts Therapist and Community Arts Facilitator

Why This Work Exists

Many professionals working in justice, therapy, education, and community leadership hold strong ethical commitments and still find themselves repeating relational patterns that feel difficult to interrupt.

That’s because hierarchical and colonial systems reproduce themselves through everyday participation habits such as:

premature resolution
loss of shared responsibility
care turning into management
discomfort being absorbed instead of distributed

When participation shifts, something structural shifts with it.

This work exists to create practice environments where those shifts can be felt, studied, and lived.