Hi!
Preparatory action.
An official bio:
Anna Jackson is a consultant who specializes in strategy development, program design and evaluation, implementation, systems change, capacity building, and designing and facilitating collaborative learning experiences. She brings an equity orientation to her practice and has worked in many domains and contexts, including healthcare, the nonprofit sector, philanthropy, the private sector, higher ed, and research. She has particular expertise in wellness-and-recovery-oriented behavioral health approaches and facilitative capacity building.
Anna has spent much of her career promoting mental health in communities and shifting practices within the public behavioral health system. Since 2009, she has been a change agent focused on transforming behavioral health systems so that peer support services are widely available and all services are person-centered and wellness-and-recovery-oriented. To that end, she has led many programs and collaborative learning initiatives that integrate implementation science and participatory change methods, helping organizational teams work with complexity while implementing peer support services, person-centered planning, and centering the voices and leadership of people with lived experience.
Liberating Structures are participatory methods that are central to Anna’s work. She first adopted the repertoire in 2011 and now works with others as they integrate the methods into their everyday and strategic work, using the repertoire to help individuals and groups imagine new possibilities for their work and move toward the future together. As a young adult, Anna ran experiential youth leadership programs in the Sierra Nevada. These formative experiences contributed to her passion for approaches that emphasize collective leadership and led her to complexity science, the theoretical foundation of Liberating Structures.
Anna holds a Master of Science in Social Work from The University of Texas at Austin and a Bachelor of Arts in Social Anthropology from the University of California, Davis.
I am also part of Lucky Hunch, which focuses on designing and facilitating experiences that affirm the imagination, creativity, and intelligence of groups. Learn more. View our most recent newsletter and video hello.
Listen
In this episode of Control the Room (below), I spoke with host Douglas Ferguson about facilitative practice, mutuality in learning partnerships, and embracing periods of fallow.
In this Humanities for the Public Good podcast episode (below), Postdoctoral Fellows Ashley Cheyemi McNeil and Laura Perry interview me and Fisher Qua about our Liberating Structures practice.