What We Do
For more than a decade, across the Central region of the US, and beyond, the Compass Culture, Climate and Courage Team has been engaged in the work of bridge-building. We’ve helped groups build bridges across cultural divides like race and ethnicity; we’ve supported bridge-building across historical divides that were constructed decades ago, maintained due to a lack of awareness, and then ignored out of fear of making them worse. Our work has helped communities build bridges that span opportunity and economic divides, gender divides, educational, political, even religious divides.
These bridges are built through stories shared in ways that develop trust.
We bring individuals and communities together to tell their stories, the big stories of their cultures, traditions and shared experiences, and the small stories of their loves, challenges and losses. Through all of this, Circles of Trust© have been formed, differences have been navigated, and traumas have begun the healing process. This is the work of CircleBridge, a framework for transforming relationships and systems within organizations or communities. Sure, much of our work has happened within education, but we’ve also brought the CircleBridge approach to gatherings as diverse as communities of faith, prison inmates, and family groups.
Beginning with the telling of stories, we move through the challenges of listening deeply, turning to wonder concerning our differences, and choosing to show up fully to the circle while ensuring the circle stays open and welcoming to every other human being gathered there.
Through this process, organizations identify their guiding principles, their own Touchstones to come back to again and again and identify the voices that have gained the experience and gravitas to be considered the wise voices of their elders.
Transforming schools, businesses or non-profits doesn’t have to begin with a high-dollar consulting agency. It can begin simply by sitting down together and learning how to listen, share, grow in awareness of how our histories may still be coloring our future together in ways that hold us back from the transformation we know our organizations need.
CircleBridge is not one thing. CircleBridge is not a way of getting a set of helpful outside ideas. CircleBridge is a way of uncovering and enacting the intuitive and human ideas your organization or community already has: the ones that simply need a safe and courageous circle in order to surface.
Some Types of Needs We Help People Address
Each of Compass’ Culture, Climate & Courage projects, websites, documentaries, trainings, workshops, or presentations grows out of the CircleBridge framework. When you come to us with your organization’s particular challenge, we will turn to this guiding framework of long-tested and successful processes to determine a direction and propose our plan for facilitating, supporting and assisting your transformative journey. Those who have come to us over the last decade of our work, haven’t always known exactly what they wanted or needed, but have brought with them the request to meet a broad range of challenges. They’ve asked for our help with things like:
Developing Culturally Responsive Practices in school or work settings
Implementing Indigenous Education initiatives or requirements
Addressing school Climate and Culture challenges
Better practice of Social Emotional Learning
Developing greater Relational Trust among adults in their school, business or workplace
Facilitation of challenging conversations
Gaining awareness of Equity and Justice issues, and ways of addressing them
Coaching and Modeling of classroom implementation of Responsive Practices
Mentoring and mentoring or leadership training
Intercultural Agility to help individuals gain tools for navigating difference
Retreat Design and Facilitation
Video Storytelling to identify key themes or guiding principles
Development of documentary films
Development of video resource websites
Navigating school or organizational change/restructuring
Our Learning Specialists are all prepared in at least two key bodies of researched practice that are foundational to the CircleBridge framework:
Center for Courage & Renewal Facilitation (2-year preparation)
Intercultural Development Inventory (administration and debrief conferencing)
Additionally, each of us brings a body of unique knowledge and experience, as well as enthusiasm, to any challenge you bring to us.
We look forward to beginning a journey with you!
This custom GPT is trained to assist you, once you’ve taken the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) to begin to set goal for growth using the Touchstones for building trustworthy spaces.
If you and your staff choose to work with us, we will be able to administer the IDI and work with you to practice the tools that will help your team reach it’s intercultural goals of navigating differences in productive and respectful ways.
CircleBridge Websites
- WoLakota Project Our South Dakota site dedicated to Indigenous Elder interviews and essential understandings
- Teachings of Our Elders Our North Dakota site dedicated to Indigenous Elder interviews and essential understandings
- Green Siblings Project Our National Parks-funded site featuring a documentary film and Social Justice workshop featuring interviews with Treopia, Ernest and Scott Green concerning life in the Jim Crow South and the 1957 Desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, AR
- Blue Deer Learning Our video story-telling project with Texas A&M International University’s College of Education Teacher Preparation Pathway
CircleBridge Films and Documentaries
Thought Partners & Advisory Board
We’ve had great support in developing and clarifying the CircleBridge approach from a group of thought partners that we have worked with for over the last decade. These partners have also agreed to serve as an advisory board for our work:
