Leading with Power

Big Soul partners with leaders and organizations to analyze and realign power across three distinct levels: personal leadership, interpersonal dynamics, and systemic design.

Our integrated model—based on The Power Manual by Cyndi Suarez—combines an immersive foundational workshop, power coaching, community power building structures, and an ongoing monthly peer learning forum to ensure leaders have the capacity and strategy needed to drive lasting, structural change.

All social relations are laden with power. Getting out from under dominant power relations and mastering liberatory power is perhaps the most essential skill for changemakers. Mastering power is about understanding and using patterns. In this workshop, you learn how power shows up at the personal, social, and systemic levels. You explore the key ways that power is developed, deployed, and transformed.

This is multi-layered advising designed for changemakers who need to decode, navigate, and reshape complex power dynamics. Moving far beyond traditional leadership development, we focus explicitly on how power is held, wielded, and balanced in change work.

This service guides power-building organizations through a collaborative discovery process to co-create an organic leadership ladder tailored to their unique community. We audit your existing volunteer base to uncover natural stages of engagement, stage-specific behaviors, and the precise capacities needed to advance. We then help you deploy an organizational strategy where each tier of your base actively develops and leads the tier below them. The result is a highly functional pipeline that prevents staff burnout, scales campaign turnout, and builds a self-replicating culture of community power.

 This is a 1-hour online problem-solving space for leaders implementing power strategies.

We deliver a “Mastering the 3 Levels of Power” talk, as well as custom talks.