Our impact: a statement on our two-year anniversary

Why we do this work 

Alma Partners launched in 2020 and was founded on the belief that institutions are first and foremost communities that have an opportunity and a responsibility to build a culture of belonging, courage, and honesty, in collaboration with the people that make up their communities. Decades of firsthand experiences have shown us that, in most communities, a gap between ideals and actions often opens over time. We came together to address that gap: to see it, name it, and take steps to close it. 

We do this work so that every individual and community we partner with, and those they serve, can speak truth, be themselves, feel seen and valued, and develop their capacity to participate in the world with dignity, inspiration, joy, freedom, purpose, meaning, and love.

How we do this work

As urgent daily activities take priority, individuals in every community struggle to find the time and energy to connect each day over their shared mission and larger goals. Alma Partners  functions as a mirror for what is and a window into what could be.  We lead workshops and courses, offer institutional DEIJ audits, and help clients develop and implement Bias Incident Protocols, strategic plans, and other processes and policies. We partner with schools and organizations to ensure alignment between institutional ideals and institutional culture, between what clients say they want to do and what they actually do.   

We know that education is an integral component of transformation in society and we work primarily with schools and educators. A big part of what we do involves integrating diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) into pedagogy and curriculum in schools (public and private) in the Waldorf movement in the US and Canada. 

Who we are

A post we made on Instagram in October 2021 sums it up pretty well:

We are [11] colleagues, learning from and growing with each other every day. We are Waldorf teachers and staff, Waldorf parents, longtime educators and activists, folks without children. We are Black, Indigenous, Latino/x, Asian, multiracial, White. We are queer, straight, cisgender, nonbinary. We are introverts and extroverts and points in between. We are a wide range of personalities, philosophies, temperaments, sizes, ages, abilities. We have strong opinions and we laugh a lot. We live in two countries and five states in the US. We love Waldorf education and we want it to transform, to serve all children. 

We love being a part of this group, and this moment, and we are grateful to all the schools who are working with us. 

We are not slick or shallow, we are not afraid of messy or uncomfortable, and we are in this for the long haul.

How we started

Several of us have known each other for more than a decade, some even longer. The seeds of Alma Partners were planted during conversations that started in the 2000s. By 2008, several of us were leading DEIJ work in our schools. We invited each other to come speak in those schools. We read what others in our network were writing. We inspired each other, we checked in, we stayed in touch. We listened to each other, looked for opportunities to come together, looked out for each other. 

In 2020, the six co-founders – Randolph Carter, Meggan Gill, Keelah Helwig, Katie Ketchum*, Vicki Larson, and Linda Williams – came together to launch Alma Partners. We quickly invited in six additional associates – Masumi Hayashi-Smith, Renita LiVolsi, Aiyana Masla, Joaquin Muñoz, Heather Scott, and Kenya Strong – who enriched our group immensely. Within six months, we were working with more than a dozen clients across North America. 

*In 2021, Katie Ketchum stepped back from Alma Partners to focus on other work and family, but she stays in close touch with us. We are grateful for her support and her many gifts.  

Our impact

Alma Partners has had a busy two years, and has experienced tremendous learning and growth.  

Since our founding, Alma Partners has worked with about 60 clients: private schools, charter schools, small initiative schools, a YMCA camp, a Camphill community, and Waldorf teacher training institutes and leadership bodies, including the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA), the Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America (WECAN), Alkion Center, and Sunbridge Institute.

We have offered nearly 80 workshops, serving about 3,000 participants. 

We have helped seven Waldorf schools create a Bias Incident Protocol to identify and reduce incidents of bias.

Our 40-hour online course, Fulfilling Our Promise: Becoming Inclusive Waldorf Communities, has launched or will launch in 2022-23 in at least five schools.

We created a proprietary curriculum map now being used in more than a dozen schools.

By the end of 2022, we will have completed at least 10 DEIJ audits, assessing organizational alignment with DEIJ goals and best practices in the areas of curriculum, community life, and policies/procedures.

Our own learning, our own community

Every person who makes up Alma Partners is dedicated to the work of social justice and committed to being a lifelong learner. Since we began, we have focused on relationships: from engaging in continuous self-reflection and taking responsibility for our own growth as individuals to building the world we want to live in through the way we interact with each other and with our clients. We have focused since the start on working out of alma (soul in Spanish), out of nuance, depth, kindness, humility, courage, and truth. We have created shared knowledge and a body of resources that benefit each of us and our clients. We aim to work out of, and model, new ways of collaborating that leverage our strengths, develop our expertise, and help us overcome our limitations. We strive for authenticity and try to stay mindful, centered, and grounded. We don’t want to be quiet or preserve the status quo: we want to engage, deepen, quicken, do soul work. The list of people and places and ideas that inspire, empower, teach, and nourish us is very long and always growing.

What comes next

Because we work in so many different communities, we see patterns and respond in real time by designing new tools as needs emerge. As we continue to support communities to develop bias incident protocols, sharpen marketing and admissions strategies, create strategic plans and review governance models, focus on hiring and retention practices that build genuinely and sustainably diverse organizations, and audit their work, we are continuously reviewing and refining what we offer. 

In order to shift perspectives, change mindsets, and engage teachers in the deep and ongoing work of being curricula scholars in their particular time and place, for their students and communities, we are currently analyzing the scope and sequence of our seven core workshops. We are articulating how our online course and our workshops interact and complement each other, and creating new tools and offerings to meet the needs of our organization and those we serve, including a storytelling course that has been years in the making, launching this month. We are in the planning stages of several other projects, including several public events for 2022-23. 

How you can participate

Bring us to your community for a workshop or a course. Stay connected through Instagram, LinkedIn, and our website, where we regularly share updates and free resources. Reach out if there’s something you’d like us to offer, or do, or know. 

We are deeply grateful for the support of so many these past two years.