Working towards just and equitable futures
About Us
Integra is a consultancy specializing in learning and strategy for power-building and systems change efforts.
Our approach is grounded in inclusive and participatory methods, centering the people and places at the heart of the work. We create spaces and processes that strengthen the relationships, networks, and adaptive capacity within organizations and their ecosystems. We work alongside our partners to reflect, learn, and design with intention.
We collaborate with a diverse network of consultants, including evaluation designers, workshop facilitators, researchers, and subject-matter experts.
OUR VALUES
We are committed to…
Intentionally adding value to support organizations and individuals working to advance structural change.
Creating inclusive and adaptive processes that recognize complexity, foster essential conversations, and result in better design.
Shifting power to center the autonomy and expertise of those who are closest to the issues.
Leading with curiosity to prioritize creativity, learning, and real growth.
Working towards potential, embracing pragmatic optimism as our shared responsibility to build better futures.
OUR FOCUS
While we support a range of issues and strategies, we are focused on efforts that seek to change dominant structures and build new possibilities.
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Community power is the ability for communities to have autonomy and self-determination, i.e., make decisions about the issues that impact them.
Power building involves developing, sustaining, and growing an organized base of people who act together to set agendas, shift the public discourse, influence who makes decisions, and cultivate ongoing relationships of mutual accountability with decision-makers that change systems.
Building community power is a fundamental dimension of social change, essential to solving historic and current inequitable distribution of power and resources along lines of race and class, and building a healthy democracy and an equitable society.
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A narrative reflects a shared interpretation of how the world works, often legitimizing existing power dynamics and reinforcing inequities.
Narrative change is the work of reframing the entrenched narratives that inform our concepts of identity, community, and belonging, and block the awareness and will to change. This work is an essential, long-term element of structural change.
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Advocacy and policy change efforts seek to change and improve the systems that we live within by changing the behavior of institutions and people in power.
While advocacy is essential to improving the policies and practices that impact people’s lives, these efforts may not truly shift power unless done in partnership with power building and narrative change.
INSIGHTS FROM INTEGRA
Reflections and ideas on strategy, practice, and the challenges—and opportunities—shaping our field.
Interdependence of Independent Consultants, Parts 1 & 2
What does it take to collaborate with care and equity outside of traditional organizational structures? Read the two-part blog from Laura and collaborators Virginia Roncaglione and Kelsey Manne:
Cultivating learning cultures in philanthropy
What does it mean to actually learn as an organization, and what does it take to make it happen? In a time of systems collapse, it becomes even more vital to learn in ways that help us move forward together, rather than tightening the hatches or staying in our silos.
Read more from Integra founder Laura Lehman and collaborator Veena Pankaj »
Stay tuned for more to come here.
the story behind our nameWhy “Integra”?
Integra comes from integrate, “to unite or make whole,” and integral, “essential to completeness.”
We approach our work through a whole-systems lens, understanding that organizations and individuals are embedded within the systems around them, and that none operate alone.
“To be’ is to inter-be—we cannot just be by ourselves alone. We have to inter-be with every other thing.” —Nhất Hạnh
Curious? Let’s chat.
