We are proud to announce that all our diversity and inclusion work is now also available in diverse online formats: facilitated online workshops, a self-discovery journey with pre-recorded videos and assignments as well as a collection of questions with beautiful photos that can be used to open up conversations around diversity and inclusion. We also facilitate online workshops for leadership teams focusing on the re-authoring ideas and practices around inclusive leadership. 

Please contact Chené chene@transformations.co.za or Lungi lungiemolamu@gmail.com for more information

Re-authoring Diversity & Inclusion Facilitated Online Workshops           

Our 12-hour online Re-authoring Diversity and Inclusion workshops can be facilitated over different time frames to accommodate the unique contexts of organisations, schools and communities: two days, one day or divided into smaller segments that can be stretched over a period of time. We also work with leadership teams in co-creating an inclusive culture within their organisations. 

How will we learn? In all of these journeys we learn through conversation and the movement between content and life experiences wherein the learning experience seeks to ignite the beauty and dignity of all who participates. We always do our best to make our time together as engaging as possible with enough breaks to keep the attention, small group conversations, content pieces, individual work, large group conversations and sharing reflections.

What will we learn? In our time together, we will explore how our capacity as story-makers and meaning-makers influence our way of being with the “other”. We will also discover how the gifts of dignity, human connectedness and hospitality can open up possibilities in our relationships to “unother” the “other”. In this 12-hour online workshop programme, we cover the following important themes:

• The construction of the other through:

– Cultural identity and in particular language

– The stories we tell

– Societal beliefs and ideas

• Privilege and power
• Discrimination
• Practices of inclusion

Who should attend? Leaders, managers, HR and OD practitioners, coaching professionals, educators, learners, social workers, facilitators of group-work, activists and healthcare professionals.

Invite us to adapt and facilitate this workshop for you in order to acknowledge and weave in the needs of your particular context.

Re-authoring Diversity and Inclusion Ideas and Practices for Leaders

We have also adapted our Re-authoring Diversity and Inclusion online workshop to focus on inclusive leadership ideas and practices because they are important in the transformation agenda. All the content mentioned above are therefore applied to the field of leadership with the following possible outcomes:

At the end of our time together, leaders will:

• be able to work with practices that welcome and embrace diverse perspectives
• know what to do to contradict the discrimination or ISMs because these get in the way of us living the organisation/company/committee’s values
• be able to confront their own biases
• have developed a common understanding and talked about and identified unfair discrimination
• have an understanding of how the cycle of prejudice works
• be able to create platforms where re-authoring relationships with the “other” becomes possible in the transformation of organisational culture
• understand how inclusive leadership will help participants to thrive in their increasingly diverse environment.

In all our online workshop we work with a very skilled online host who is our right hand in creating the welcome and inclusion in this space.

Table Conversations

In most cultures, the table or fire is the place for gathering, for telling stories and sharing wisdom and teachings. We are currently working on a collection of reflecting questions around diversity and inclusion that want to provide individuals, communities or groups with the opportunity to connect, weave meaning and share stories in ways that fascinate and transport through the naming of that which matters to people dearly.

Here is our previous collection of questions called Reflecting questions at the end of the year in the time of a Pandemic.

Re-authoring Diversity and Inclusion Facilitated Processes

We also offer processes and experiences with invitations and practices that re-humanise school and work communities through the telling, retelling and witnessing of the multiple stories of our lived experiences.

Re-authoring work provides ways of seeing and doing that invite individuals, communities and organisations to move through because it

• Builds human connections with the “other” that honours their beauty, dignity and knowledges
• Co-creates team/communal stories that we want more of
• Assists in separating from team/communal stories that we want less of
• Facilitates conversations where the problem is the problem
• Invites ownership in co-authoring a different future
• Allows for the invitation of one to really listen to the story of the other
• Opens up actions of what we want to do differently as a school/work community

Lungi and Chené are also available to provide coaching in the field of diversity and inclusion.

Story of Us

Our co-facilitation journey started in 2008 when we were both invited to participate as facilitators in a big change initiative at one of the platinum mining groups here in South Africa. The 4-year journey taught me how powerful stories are to “unother” the other, how willing and open participants are to have difficult conversations if the space for dignity is created and how the taken-for-granted beliefs and ideas about one another are so influential in what we think and do.

Most important of all, this work gave me the gift of beautiful friendships that grew out of hours of driving, talking, dreaming and working together.

It is here where I met Lungi Molamu, my dear friend and co-facilitator. Our work is built on a deep friendship, years of experience in the evolution of the field of Diversity and Inclusion.  In the last couple of years, narrative re-authoring ideas and practices have influenced how we create a re-dignifying space where our conversations invite stories that build bridges to the other.

Meet Lungi Molamu

Lungi Molamu is an Organisational Development Consultant from South Africa having worked for over twenty years in the area of Diversity and Inclusion. She completed a two- year Advanced Diploma in Narrative Ideas in 2016 and has been incorporating these ideas in her work.

The gifts she brings to her work on Diversity and Inclusion as a Narrative Therapist, drives her to examine and to question the social conditioning we have taken for granted, the various roles we have created for ourselves and others over time, and the realisation that we have choices in re-authoring these narratives. This re-authoring constitutes a new relationship with life and the world that enables one the creation and recreation of the self as a character in one’s own on-going story. Narrative re-authoring work has a transformational character which is critical in Diversity and Inclusion processes.

What is the role of the re-authoring ideas and practices in diversity and inclusion work?

Re-authoring work facilitates ways of seeing and doing that invites individuals, communities and organisations to take back the pen in the authoring of their lives and their worlds. It builds on the human capacity to weave meaning into narratives in our given world. As we do this work, the beauty, dignity and knowledges of individuals and communities are deeply honoured. Re-authoring work opens up new possibilities and imagined futures wherein human beings co-author their relationships with everything we are in a relationship with.

In diversity and inclusion work, through the re-authoring lens, all who participate, are seen as “respectworthy” because they “possess the greatest kind of value, not because they are useful for bringing about somebody else’s goals or desires, but simply because they live a human life. They matter. They have dignity and we owe them respect”. (Hilde Lindemann Nelson, 2001, Damaged Identities: Narrative Repair)

Diversity and inclusion work that grows from the re-authoring approach, understands that the way we see and act towards people who are different from us in terms of race, gender, age, culture, language, etc. are shaped and maintained through narratives, and the histories that have shaped these narratives and the taken-for-granted beliefs and ideas that support them.