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Consulting with Soul

Alma Partners is a diverse, multiracial, multigenerational group of 11 experienced consultants and facilitators who offer workshops, courses, Student Leadership Conferences, organizational audits, individual and group consultation, strategic planning, curriculum review and development, and more for schools and other organizations.

Founded in 2020 after 10 years of germination, we are unique in having decades of experience in schools, non-profits, and movements for social justice, while understanding the imperatives for educators to bring age-appropriate content to students and organizational leaders to build bridges and navigate differing opinions in their communities.

Drawing on our individual and collective background leading transformational, anti-racist, anti-bias work with soul (“alma” in Spanish), we are currently engaged with several non-profit organizations as well as about 40 schools (public and private), mainly in the Waldorf movement in the US and Canada. Our unique, heart-centered, relationship-based approach is also well-suited to Montessori schools and other independent schools, as well as homeschooling groups. Contact us about customized content for your organization.

We help organizations bridge the gap that sometimes opens up between ideals and actions.
We drive culture change with our clients and put relationships at the core of everything we do – within our organization and yours.
We guide and support you to identify ways to transform and thrive, more deeply aligning your practices with your organization’s fundamental values.
We work online and in-person, partnering with you on long-term organizational goals and helping you solve short-term challenges

What We Offer

Workshops

We offer a core arc of seven two-hour workshops, held in person, online, or a mix of the two. Learn more here.
Online Courses

To build community, sharpen skills, and add to your collective toolkit, we offer online courses for schools and organizations, designed to acquaint participants with the DEIJ landscape and deepen the potential for transformation in their communities. We also offer public courses for individuals .
Strategic Planning

Working with a tested strategic planning process, we guide your organization from start to finish and help you create a comprehensive, actionable, multi-year plan.
Student Leadership Conferences (SLC)

Student Leadership Conferences create a space where student leaders can dialogue honestly across differences and adult supporters can model engaged, responsive leadership. Help build students’ confidence, sense of belonging, facilitation skills, and leadership capacity, and develop cross-school networks that empower youth and center their voices.
Individual and Group Consultation and Mentoring

We support school leadership and organizational leadership (Administrators, Boards, DEIJ Committees, Admissions Offices, Hiring Committees, and others) to build inclusive organizations.
DEIJ Audit/Assessment

Our DEIJ audit/assessment covers three areas: curriculum/program, community life, and policies/procedures. Through our process, which takes about 3-6 months, we help your organization build internal capacity, gather data to inform planning and decision-making, and identify action items to shift culture.
Curriculum Review and Development

We can support you to contextualize your school’s curriculum in an age-appropriate way, using a DEIJ lens.
Policy Review and Development

Our most popular policy offering is a Bias Incident Protocol that helps you define, track, resolve, and work to reduce incidents of bias. Other policy review and development is available as well.
Mediation/Conflict Resolution

We partner with professional mediators to reduce and resolve conflict in your organization in a holistic, sustainable way.

See all of our Offerings

"Alma Partners helped guide us in creating a dynamic and sustainable strategic plan for our organization. It was an exciting and clarifying process. It is important to have outside expert support for this kind of work. Alma Partners organized our collective thoughts and deepest aspirations into a dynamic, easy-to-follow roadmap. They came, they listened, they shaped our hopes and dreams into a workable plan for today and our immediate future. Thank you, Alma Partners!"

ANNE BAILEY, BOARD PRESIDENT, TRIFORM CAMPHILL COMMUNITY
"We couldn’t have asked for a more supportive and expert team of people to work with our faculty, staff, and parents. Our mentors were warm, generous, incisive, and professional every step of our journey together. We are grateful to continue our work with Alma Partners into the future!"

ACORN WALDORF SCHOOL
"I am delighted to offer my heartfelt appreciation for Alma Partners and their exceptional contribution to our school community. Their expertise in supporting Circle of Seasons in crafting a strategic plan has been nothing short of transformative. From the outset, Alma Partners demonstrated a deep understanding of our school's unique needs and aspirations. They meticulously analyzed our current challenges and opportunities, offering insightful recommendations that were both innovative and practical. Throughout our partnership, Alma Partners exhibited professionalism, integrity, and a genuine commitment to our school's success. I am excited to move into the next phase of developing our Implementation Plan & Year 1 Action Plan with Alma Partners!"

JOSEPH HUBER, PRINCIPAL & CEO, Circle of Seasons Charter School
“The Alma Partners DEIJ Audit provided invaluable insights that have significantly shaped Detroit Waldorf School's ongoing diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice efforts. The audit highlighted areas of success and potential growth for our school, fostering rich conversations among our faculty, staff, and board, helping to inform actionable steps in our current strategic planning and accreditation self-study processes. The audit results will have a lasting impact on our school's culture and are currently being referenced when updating internal documents, speaking with parents and teachers about evolving curriculum and policies, and studying our school's culture through the DEIJ lens.”

—BEN LINSTROM, SCHOOL ADMINISTRATOR, DETROIT WALDORF SCHOOL
"[The facilitators] exude openness and encouragement, but also deep conviction and that helps create a trusting environment for us to learn. Thank you!"

PEDAGOGICAL STORYTELLING FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD PARTICIPANT
“Thank you so much for the work you do! I am a Waldorf graduate, teacher, and now administrator. The work you do and how you do it is inspiring and helps me continue in and believe in the Waldorf movement.”

CHRISTIANNA RILEY, PEDAGOGICAL LEAD & EARLY CHILDHOOD TEACHER
BERKSHIRE WALDORF SCHOOL
“The staff and faculty at the Waldorf School of Philadelphia has been engaging with the Alma Partners course series, Fulfilling Our Promise: Becoming Inclusive Waldorf Communities. This series of courses has provided us scaffolding for creating a shared language, for goal setting and maintaining dialogue around anti-bias and anti-racism in a deep in meaningful way! Each course provides relevant historical and contemporary content and really encourages us to interrogate ourselves and our community. We are so grateful to you all for your collaboration and strong direction in this work. We will continue to work with the material and know that it will have a profound effect on our community.”

THE WALDORF SCHOOL OF PHILADELPHIA
“Keelah Helwig and Vicki Larson have facilitated several roundtable discussions for Sunbridge Institute’s teacher education students and Collaborative Leadership course participants on the difficult and important subject of racism and oppression in our country. They have led these discussions with both true professionalism and profound empathy, allowing those participating to feel respected and heard. Keelah and Vicki’s commitment to this work and their experience working with Waldorf schools and communities allows them to speak with authenticity and a deep understanding of the crucial conversations we all must be having today. We are very grateful to them both for bringing their expertise to Sunbridge, and we look forward to continue working with them in the future.”

JESSICA HEFFERNAN ZIEGLER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, SUNBRIDGE INSTITUTE
"It's impressive how organized and thorough Alma Partners and its presenters/facilitators are. The work they bring to schools is imperative."

JANICE ALVARADO STEWART, FULFILLING OUR PROMISE PARTICIPANT
"Not only are you using your time and energy to work toward change for the better, but you're also uplifting and supporting others who strive to do so. It is a rare and profound gift to witness an organization/collection of folks living so fully in service to the greater good."

-MARIA ALLEN, INDIVIDUAL PARTICIPANT IN ALMA PARTNERS OFFERINGS, ASHEVILLE WALDORF SCHOOL

Our Core Values

See the Alma Partners Glossary for our definitions of key terms like diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice.

We approach uncomfortable, messy, challenging, complex, and vulnerable realities with courage and kindness. We aim to be honest, to be humble, to work from depth and possibility. Our guiding principle is love.
We seek to model the world we imagine. With each other, we build connection, demonstrate respect, and practice care. With our work, we continuously review and adapt what we offer and how we offer it. With clients, we support healing and evolution. We do our best to be authentic, responsive, and accountable.
We strive to build a world where all people are seen, treated with dignity, and free to express their full selves. Refusing to oversimplify the subtleties of human experience, we recognize and attend to the compounding effects of oppression on the identities of each person and group. We appreciate difference and work to build shared understanding.
We express our values in our lives, relationships, and communities. We strive to define and articulate the ideals of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice, integrating them into our actions and ways of being. We have been involved in this endeavor for decades and are committed to engaging with this work as a lifelong journey.
We are dedicated to having a practical, meaningful impact. We aim to be accessible for a range of budgets and types of organizations, and for people of different abilities and learning styles. We ask for and integrate feedback. Offering resources, building capacity, and sharing a lifelong commitment to our own learning, we begin with self-study and inner work as a necessary foundation for collaboration, community education, and transformation.