Whitney Benns

Emotional Labor Organizer

FACILITATOR · EDUCATOR · COACH

Whitney Benns
Whitney Benns

I hold space for relational work inside organizations and collectives, helping you move through conflict and strengthen the important work that brought you together.

EMOTIONAL LABOR ORGANIZING

I hold space to bring intentionality, integrity, and rigor to relational work.

What does an emotional labor organizer do?

Every movement organization, foundation, school, and collective requires emotional labor. Conflict between co-directors. How a team processes change (or doesn't). Frustration and confusion that accumulate when the work is hard and the wins are slow. People show up carrying everything they've lived through, everything the work requires of them, their expectations, and, often, strong feelings about each other. Too often, these relational conditions are ignored, avoided, or explode without moving the group forward. The work slows down. Important collectives break up. Good collaborators quit.

I believe that's an organizing problem. An organizer helps people see that what they're experiencing individually has collective dimensions and that those dimensions can be acted on together. The same is true for the relational work of a collective, team, or organization. While conflict is inevitable when we put humans in shared space, we need each other. And our struggles with each other can be named, understood, and transformed.

Doing so requires curiosity, rigorous listening, creative process, effective communication and negotiation — with care for each person and a collective orientation. As an emotional labor organizer, I support my partners with this work. Together, we explore what needs to be learned, shared, and negotiated to change their collective relational conditions and strengthen the important work that brought them together.

REPRESENTATIVE PROJECTS

Work I have been invited into

Every engagement is different. These projects give a sense of the moments, organizations, and challenges where my support has been useful.

  • Coalition Conflict Navigation for a Reproductive Justice Campaign

    I was brought in to support a coalition of local and national groups working together on a significant reproductive justice campaign. The coalition was under strain. Campaign meetings were tense, and conflict was eroding trust rather than generating new ideas. Inherently difficult decisions carried high stakes for members trying to stay aligned with their organizational priorities and constituents. I conducted diagnostic interviews and co-facilitated a two-day retreat that produced agreements on guiding principles for communication and a detailed conflict process to use when tensions resurfaced. After the retreat, I continued to support the coalition by coaching facilitators and project managers on how to guide the group through critical decisions with material and relational consequences.

  • Staff Development for an Equitable Neighborhood Investment Org

    I supported a neighborhood investment organization doing serious values-driven work in community. The organization wanted to expand capacity around practicing their principles internally where the daily friction of working across roles and teams made directness, feedback, and accountable conflict harder. I designed and facilitated a six-session, 13-month program for internal staff built around N’Tanya Lee's framework of principled struggle. Each half-day session connected concepts with reflection and practice, developing skills around directness, accountability, and conflict. The program concluded with the group using those tools to collectively draft shared North Stars for the year ahead.

  • Anti-Carceral Conflict Culture Support for a Holistic Defense Law Firm

    I was brought into a legal organization providing holistic defense to indigent clients during a period of significant organizational tension, when bottom-up feedback processes had surfaced widespread concerns and staff were navigating the aftermath. Working across the organization and with two specific practice groups, I conducted diagnostics, led workshops on Negotiation, Navigating Conflict, and Feedback, and supported leadership and staff in developing shared frameworks through an anti-carceral lens that held accountability and care together. Through trust-building 1:1 conversations and a clear group process, we created the conditions for hard things to be said and felt with transparency, complexity, and dignity across roles and levels of hierarchy.

  • Facilitation & Curriculum Design for a Black Leadership Cohort

    I was invited to facilitate an 18-month regional leadership cohort through a collective study program rooted in the Black Radical Tradition. In the aftermath of a major regional movement, organizing and political leadership suffered when external pressure, internal fracture, and well-intentioned outside actors disrupted the movement’s energy. This cohort was convened to build relational infrastructure and fortify connections so the community could better withstand those dynamics. I collaborated with the cohort leadership team, designed a curriculum, worked with expert guests, and facilitated sessions to help the cohort study and sit with disagreement, make collective decisions, and collaboratively direct community resources.

  • Joint Leadership Coaching at a Research Nonprofit

    I served as a joint leadership coach for a founder (whose identity was bound up in the organization's philosophy and public direction) and an executive director (focused on internal culture and collaboration) who were at an impasse about how to lead together. Our work spanned relational pain points and strategic priorities for the organization. Through confidential 1:1 sessions and facilitated joint sessions, we worked through strong feelings and principled disagreements. The sessions created a space for more honesty, good yeses and noes, and deeper understanding of differences in vision. Both leaders left with more clarity about what they needed, what was possible, and where they needed to go.

  • Co-Facilitation for a Black Organizational Ecosystem Cohort

    I was brought in by a regional foundation to co-facilitate a multi-year cohort of Black-led organizations after tensions had risen across organizations with different systems-change strategies. We’ve designed and held monthly convenings that build ecosystem-level capacity and stronger relationships across organizations through skill-building workshops, political education, and facilitation of important strategic conversations. Our aim is for organizational leaders to build thicker connections as people and strategists so that tactical differences or moments of disagreement don't foreclose solidarity and future collaboration.

MY OFFERINGS

Three ways I can support the relational conditions of your organization

  • Facilitating Workshops

    Even when we want to have the real conversation, we can get stuck on past failures. This won’t go anywhere. They won’t change. Talking isn’t worth it.  We often don’t believe we can shape change, or don’t have the skills to do so well. I design and facilitate experiential, reflective learning experiences tailored to where your team or organization is and the tools they need. My workshops create the conditions to move beyond avoidance by building skills for generative conflict, giving and receiving feedback, principled negotiation, and group dynamics. 

  • Coaching Leaders & Teams

    Leaders and teams navigating the pressures, decisions, and relationships that come with doing important work in challenging contexts can often feel alone or in need of trusted guidance. I help leaders by providing a sounding board for critical reflection, accountability for following through on relational work, and creativity to clear new paths through old patterns. I also coach teams, helping them work together and make shifts they want (and need). My coaching is grounded in my training in Emergent Strategy and Kantor Structural Dynamics, and my expertise in negotiation and conflict.

  • Holding Conflict

    Conflict is essential to our ability to grow, and also deeply challenging to find ourselves in. I hold space for relational conflict, communication breakdowns, and ruptures in collective relationships. Each conflict is different. I follow what's alive, surface difficult dynamics, and help people think and feel beyond the confines of what currently seems possible. Together we explore the layers of shared and separate experience, and build toward experiments, agreements, and norms that move from talking into new collective practice.

ABOUT WHITNEY

I was born in the rocky mountain west and now split my time between St. Louis and Cambridge. I came to this work through law school, through movement spaces, and through watching smart, dedicated people get stuck because the relational conditions weren't there to match their vision and drive. I became a facilitator to cultivate those connections through the victories and the setbacks, the daily grind and the futures we are fighting for. 

I built the negotiation program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education with colleagues, and have taught negotiation and fugitive negotiation —the practice of navigating power, space, and purpose within institutions that weren't built with you in mind—at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education for over a decade.

  • Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School

    Lecturer on Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education

  • J.D., Harvard Law School

    B.S. Political Science & International Relations, University of Utah

  • Emergent Strategy Facilitation

    Kantor Structural Dynamics

    Family Systems

Let’s talk about what you’re moving through

Whether you're looking for a facilitator for a specific moment, a coach for sustained support, or someone to hold a conflict your organization hasn't known how to approach,  I'd love to hear what's happening and explore how we might work together. Share your information and I'll be in touch.