Consulting + Facilitation

Working in collaboration to align organizational values and practices, co-create transformative strategy that grows from community-centered research, while growing authentic relationships and  our collective capacity to take good care of each other

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Current Collaborators

I work with the beloved collaborators below to support non-profit, philanthropic, for profit, and emergent community-led ventures learn, align, and design their work for impact and sustainability.

Spiral Path Consulting

Learning and facilitation designed to grow organizational cultures and practices that center belonging and equity

The Adaway Group 

Research and strategy to support the design of inclusive organizational policies, practices, and structures 

Taproot Consulting

Participatory strategic planning and facilitation to shape wise decisions and organizational design

Recent Projects

Organizational Learning: Designing and facilitating experiential spaces for reflection, content delivery, and practice. Recent clients include a leadership development program and a progressive media organization convening caucus spaces for racial equity learning.

Culture + Equity Audits: Implementing organizational assessments to surface critical data and provide actionable recommendations. Recent client profiles include state-wide advocacy organizations and health care conversion foundations focused on increasing employee wellbeing and retention, innovating programs, and navigating rapidly shifting contexts. 

Organizational + Program Design: Crafting systems and offerings rooted in organizational vision. Recent clients include a non-profit start-up in need of accessible and effective systems and a family foundation interested in creative approaches to grantmaking designed to tangibly repair the racial wealth gap.   

Current Trainings & Workshops

  • Building Authentic Relationships for Real Collaboration 
  • Transformative Meetings + Communication Practices for Inclusive Organizational Cultures
  • Equity Goal + Action Planning for Accountability and Impact
  • Building a Feedback Rich Culture
  • When Things Fall Apart: Making Amends and Repairing Relationships
  • What’s Working? What’s Not? Making Space for Organizational Reflection and Learning
  • White Women Doing White Supremacy

Here’s what students shared…

By starting off my college experience with your course, I tapped into skills I never knew I had. You changed the course of my studies, and more importantly, you changed the lens I saw the world through. Your course is what made college a pivotal experience for me…You set the groundwork for my feminist politic and introduced me to a new way to live and love.
Z.H.

Dr. Talley facilitates class conversations so that everyone feels comfortable enough to express their opinions on sometimes controversial or difficult topics…After completing one of her projects, I felt like I had become a better writer, scholar, and critical thinker because of all the work I put into it. I have never felt that way about any other assignment during my college career, but I consistently felt that way after completing a project for Dr. Talley.
K.S.

A student of Dr. Talley’s can expect to grow. They can expect to leave their institution with the ability to think critically, to communicate clearly, and to challenge underlying assumptions. They will have known the joy of meeting intellectual challenges head on and being forced to push their capacity to think to a higher level. They will have had the opportunity to examine their relationship to the social world around them and understand it in new ways. They can expect to graduate from their institution feeling prepared for continued education or employment opportunities. Such students will find over the course of their undergraduate career, or even the course of a semester, that the experience has been a transformative one and that their lives are drastically and irrevocably changed.
S.P

Lectures, Keynotes, and Conference Presentations

As a speaker-facilitator, I have engaged groups on topics ranging from sexual consent to racism, medical innovation to queer politics, social activism to transformative teaching.I have been a featured speaker at University of Chicago, Cornell College, University of North Carolina-Charlotte, the National Women’s Studies Association, the American Sociological Society, the Society for Social Problems, and the Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit.

Select Events:

  • Book Talks about Saving Face at Oregon State University, Salem College, Pepperdine University, and the University of North Carolina-Asheville
  • It’s Not Slacktivism: Innovating Intersectional Feminist Activism in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter at The University of North Carolina-Charlotte
  • Writing Feminist Futures, From Idea to Submission at The University of North Carolina-Charlotte
  • Mediating Feminisms: A Workshop by The Feminist Wire at National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference
  • Thinking Inequalities and Difference Alongside Policies of Reproductive Politics and Sexuality at Woodhull Sexual Freedom Summit  
  • Writing Protest, Public Feminism: Notes on The Feminist Wire at Southeastern Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference
  • Sharing Feminism: The Promise of Social Media for 21st Century Feminist Consciousness Raising at WCU Gender Conference
  • Gender and the Science of Difference: Cultural Politics of Contemporary Science and Medicine at National Women’s Studies Association Annual Conference
  • Writing Pop Feminism, Doing Feminist Public Sociology at University of Chicago
  • Teaching Queerly: The Politics of Location and Other Queer Conundra in the Classroom at Queer Studies Conference UNCA
  • Aesthetic Intervention as Life Saving Work: The Case of Face Transplantation at American Sociological Association Annual Conference
  • Enacting Critical Pedagogy: Praxis in the Undergraduate Classroom at Society for the Study of Social Problems Annual Conference
  • The Contradictory Contours of the Contemporary GLBTQ Political Landscape at American Sociological Association Annual Conference

Teaching

Here’s where I’ve taught…
University of Vermont, University of California, Los Angeles, Vanderbilt University, Warren Wilson College, Western Carolina University, and Belmont University

Here’s some of what I taught…

  • Leadership for Sustainability
  • Queer Sociology
  • Medical Sociology
  • Feminist & Gender Theory
  • Public Sociology
  • Sociology of Gender

Work With Me

Sociological Expertise + Wellbeing-Centered Strategy +
Deep Listening + Wholeheartedness
Learn More