Value Aligned Collaborative Supervision through Appreciative Inquiry

Tuesday, March 25, 2025
9:00am -1:00pm
Via Zoom

As we strive to create anti-racist value-aligned organizations, supervision and supervisory relationships are a vital site of change. These relationships are at the core of most of our organizations and structure how we work together. In this training, participants will learn a powerful new approach to supervision using an Appreciative Inquiry framework based in motivational research, behavioral science, and anti-racist anti-oppression values. This practice is relational and fosters collaboration, innovation, and creativity. Traditional management principles have an ugly and dehumanizing history that position the supervisor as the knower and the one most morally invested in the work being completed. Many performance management strategies still currently used by non-profits today are based in this frame.

What: This Appreciative Inquiry Based model developed by Quantum Possibilities positions both supervisor and supervisee as knowers as it outlines a pathway for both to co-create a shared vision of success and co-design a plan to bring that vision into reality. Appreciative Inquiry is an inspiring, growth-promoting, and transformational philosophical and practical approach to frame, take inventory, envision, plan, and pursue meaningful change by building on past moments of joy, connection, and success. Understanding that change begins at the point of asking a question, this model teaches supervisors to ask strategic questions that build meaningful relationships and catalyze connection to the work. A shared commitment to excellence that becomes foundational to building actionable plans focused on what matters most in the direction of fulfilling the organization’s mission.

In this training, participants will:

• Learn to apply a racial equity framework to supervision and create opportunities for power-with rather than power-over to foster collaboration.
• ​Understand the role of collaboration in cultivating excellence, preventing burnout and secondary trauma, interrupting oppressions in the workplace.
• Develop skills in applying psychological research on learning, positive emotions and motivation to supervision practices.
• Develop skills to foster authenticity and vulnerability that facilitate generative supervisory relationships.
• Learn the four elements of an Appreciative Inquiry approach to supervision and how to implement them.

Who: This training is for staff at all levels across the Coalition's membership: advocates, managers, directors, volunteers, but may be particulary relevant for those in formal leadership roles or those who want to be in formal leadership roles.

Accommodation requests: If you have any accommodation requests, please let us know no later than March 10th.

About the Trainer: Martha Ramos Duffer, Psy.D. is a licensed psychologist, speaker, trainer, and consultant based in Austin, Texas. She is the owner and founder of Quantum Possibilities, which provides a broad array of consulting, training, coaching and therapeutic services focused on liberation in the forms of healing and growth for individuals, healing and joyful relationships for couples, and creating healthy organizational cultures of belonging for organizations committed to becoming anti-racist. After earning her doctorate degree in Clinical Psychology, she has taught undergraduate and graduate psychology courses at several universities in Texas, served as the Executive Director of allgo, a queer and trans bipoc organization focused on racial and social justice through cultural arts, community building and health services; provided psychological services through various agencies, hospitals and her own private practice; and spoken widely nationally and regionally. A frequent guest on Univision’s Despierta Austin and keynote speaker at conferences around the country, Dr. Ramos Duffer has become a sought after speaker in the areas of anti-racist organizations, racial justice, cultures of belonging, healing, motivation, secondary trauma prevention, and wellness.

CEUs available.

For more information, please contact Lea Aromin This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it