Rebecca J. Mintz
Template:TOCnestleft Rebecca J. Mintz lives in Takoma Park, Maryland. Partner of Lasitha Ranatunga.
Background
“My awakening to social justice has been a decades-long process. I grew up in a wealthy white suburb outside of Washington, DC. As I got older, I remember feeling very confused: if this is what we are told is ‘the good life,’ why is everyone so unhappy? Even though we had our material needs met, my communities felt emotionally and spiritually toxic: degrading of my womanhood and queerness, cutthroat, and very lonely. I saw how alienated we really were from one another. Through social justice communities, I have been learning to name how people with privilege are dehumanized, trading in our ancestral ways of being together for the seductive pulls of comfort and power over others. I am so grateful to be learning how to reconnect with myself and others through working for a better world.”
Rebecca has been facilitating organizational change and transformative dialogues for over 15 years. Since she first got involved in social justice work, she has always found herself naturally pulled toward process: how we do our work, how we shape our organizations, how we work with one another. More than anything, she loves facilitating organizational processes, including but not limited to strategic planning, culture shifts, conflict transformation, and board development.
Rebecca supports community organizations to become more values-aligned and effective by holding space for teams to celebrate their core strengths, and to determine how to build on those strengths. Through these dialogues, she supports organizations to collaborate in ways that allow them to truly live into their values, and to become microcosms of the world they are working to build. Part of this is work includes supporting clients to integrate their commitment to social and racial justice into their mission, strategy, and practices.
Rebecca’s consulting work is fueled by her deep engagement with movements for social and racial justice. She cut her teeth as an organizer, trainer, and facilitator in New Orleans in 2006, six months after Hurricane Katrina and the US government’s disastrous response. Now, Rebecca’s movement work is grounded in the DC Movement for Black Lives Coalition and Showing Up for Racial Justice, where she co-leads popular education, healing, and organization development. Rebecca also co-founded Service to Justice (S2J), a network of social service organizations committed to shifting from charity models to social change. Her RoadMap work for clients builds on a cooperative consulting model and a liberation ecosystem of people who support healthy and just communities.
In addition to her passion for organizational change, Rebecca is a mindfulness practitioner who believes deeply in the relationship between spiritual liberation and social liberation. She graduated with distinction from American University with a Masters of Science in Organization Development, and received a Bachelors of Arts in American Studies from Wesleyan University. She has extensive training in emergent organizational design and facilitation, and is a member of NTL Institute for Applied Behavioral Science.[1]
RoadMap
Rebecca J. Mintz is a consultant with RoadMap, a Freedom Road Socialist Organization affiliated consultancy group .[2]