CoDesign and Participatory Leadership
CDL collaborates with employers and their staff to co-create an employee-centered workplace that develops leaders and achieves optimal collaboration from the inside, out.
Innovative.
Sustainable.
Transformative.
Whether your opportunities or challenges are universal or unique, our services are customized to meet your needs, and our methods are sustainable. We provide:
Executive coaching/VIP Days
Discovery
Organizational audits and assessments
Toolkits
Trainings:
CoDesign
Participatory leadership
Teamwork
Belonging
Collaboration
Conflict management and resolution
Efficiency v. Effectiveness v. Efficacy
Burn out
Trauma
Prevention
Recovery
Organizational Wellness
Staff retreat planning and facilitation
and more…
Vision
CDL envisions an American workforce where employers prioritize their stewardship in the public health outcomes of their staff, and throughout communities. With guidance and training, employers and their employees will co-design a workplace that values and commits itself to an environment where optimal collaboration (internal and external) becomes naturally-occurring.
Values
CDL is guided by the following values that inform our praxis to co-design workplaces for optimal collaboration (including our own, of course!).
Transparency
Transparency is the primary building block for optimal collaboration and accountability. Nothing can be improved if it is not measured, and what is measured must be verifiable to all.
Urgency
We do not treat choice like process. We will not waste time co-designing a process where one does not need to exist. When optimal collaboration and accountability can be produced by simply making a different choice, we will not hesitate to make the right decision.
Transformative Justice
Anything is teachable, and anyone can lead. When you think about transformative justice, think about the pawn, positioned as a disposable vanguard, who becomes a queen if they make it to the other side of the chess board (this is called pawn promotion). Transformative justice creates leadership pipelines and increases decision-making access that includes the least powerful.
Alignment
We facilitate clear and honest conversations with employers and their staff to establish an understanding and partnership rooted in participatory leadership. This is necessary and conducive to implementing changes, from the most urgent to the most gradual, that align with producing optimal collaboration.
Participatory Leadership
With the smallest shifts expected among executive and senior leadership, the transformative potential of junior and entry-level staff are the focal point of co-design, by both depth and scale.
Change
We are prepared to change our mind. The worst reason to do something is because that's the way it’s always been done. A delay to embrace or get ahead of change inhibits evaluating where improvements could be identified, assessed, and redirected.
Rashida Latef, LMSW (she/her)
Founder and CEO
Design is everywhere; and unless we create it for ourselves, we are all living in the intention and impact of a someone else’s structure. If a system can be designed it can be co-designed using participatory leadership for optimal collaboration (input), and accountability (output). We can achieve optimal collaboration and accountability if we co-create and democratize information, language, space, and importantly, resources.
Rashida Latef has over a decade of experience in building capacity and movement alongside people with lived experience on issues such as domestic/intimate partner violence, education, food insecurity, homelessness, immigration, and movement tech. Her work with individuals, couples, families, organizations, and communities has always raised the profile of the least powerful but directly impacted, to ensure their needs and interests were included, if not determinate, when advocating for change.
Some of her notable achievements include organizing food pantry customers to successfully expand universal free school lunch in NYC public schools; registering immigrant constituents to vote in a special election won by the first formerly undocumented immigrant to Congress, Adriano Espaillat (NY-13); co-designing a national cohort of people with lived experience of homelessness who achieved unprecedented results by developing direct relationships with their elected officials to lobby for funding, programs, and policies proven to end homelessness; co-designing an open source library to provide technical assistance to electoral campaigns engaging historically disenfranchised voters during the 2020 election season; and every time she successfully organized her co-workers to change an internal workplace issue.
Rashida is proficient in Spanish, a certified yoga instructor, movement technologist, and licensed psychotherapist who teaches continuing education classes about organizing, regulation (functioning), and systems design. Rashida has been featured in Allure Magazine, Her Agenda, and you can learn more about her clinical praxis on Psychology Today.