“Opening Doors levels the playing field; it shows that we are all in this together. It was challenging and it was non-threatening. We all got to see our part in it, both the oppressed and the oppressor.”
Gail Horton, Coordinator
Suffolk Migrant Education Outreach Project
Our Approach
In order to uphold our founding principle of doing no harm, our team has worked diligently over many years to seek out the best and most innovative approaches that are rooted in personal and professional transformation that centers our shared humanity, along with joy, healing, long-lasting change, and accountability. Achieving this starts with the facilitators – requiring each of us to be on a continuous journey of self-reflection, healing, and learning based in courage, connection and compassion. We intentionally support each other and in the process, deepen our relationships and strengthen the team. Our participants often comment on how supportive and caring we are with each other – actualizing our vision for how change happens. We are a national team of diverse facilitators who have high levels of expertise and skill to create learning and unlearning spaces which are equity focused, trauma-informed, healing centered, supportive and challenging to inspire the emotional commitment for the extraordinary work of change.
What Sets Us Apart
Two components of our approach set us apart from many other workshops and trainings:
Our exploration of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) invites and acknowledges the range and intersection of human identities. Many other approaches address only one identity such as race or class, and others rank the relative importance of some identities over others. When people are able to see their own multiple identities, opportunities for growth increase dramatically.
The Opening Doors Institute offers the vision of partnership. While the focus of diversity workshops is often on the challenges and tensions inherent in JEDI work, our approach invites imagination, possibility, and innovation to create a vision for what can be beyond the status quo. Leaders/learners are invited to embrace imagination, engagement, empathy, reflection, and their discretionary power to create a path towards transformation.
Framework For Change
Our Framework for Change is grounded in relational and regenerative power-with dynamics that acknowledge and honors the varying degrees of experience, awareness, and readiness we each bring. A foundational belief embedded in our approach and style is that understanding differences in others as well as in ourselves is a life-long learning journey. As a result, we are intentional about collectively creating a supportive and challenging learning community. The experience each person brings is honored and learners/leaders are invited to share their wisdom and gain from the wisdom of others. Time and again we see that in this kind of community of learners, trust gets built quickly so that we can do the deeper work collectively in order to connect our head and heart to learn and unlearn in a space of challenge and support. This is where courageous conversations and story-telling happen – through an embrace of mind, body and spirit that welcomes in each of us the full range of inherent emotions.
This foundational framework addresses the three critical elements necessary for creating change on equity, liberation and power focused on transforming power dynamics at the individual, interpersonal, organizational, and societal level :
1. A dissatisfaction with the status quo (an understanding of the divisions and inequities borne out of power-over mindsets and structures that have harmed us all)
2. An inclusive and sustainable vision for what can be (using our radical imaginations to envision a power-with partnership world)
3. A process for getting there (skills, attitudes and approaches in order to actualize our collective vision of partnership).
The most useful part was being given a framework and language to understand oppression, the communication and sharing with very engaged, committed and enthusiastic people… for 3 days.
Anonymous Participant
Migrant Rights Centre Ireland