Launching Our Newsletter With Love
Hello Everyone!
It's me, Tessa, and I am so excited to be sharing Canopy’s first newsletter with you! In this and upcoming editions we'll be sharing lessons that our team has learned over the years as well as bringing you reflections on questions that we are often asked by our clients. Our hope is that this will become a space where you get to know us in a different way, where you pick up some gleanings that can be immediately useful in your work, and where you are moved to do some of your own self-reflection.
The timing of launching this newsletter feels very fitting to my own personal journey. In taking some time off at the end of December and coming into the new year, I have been doing a lot of reflecting and my mind keeps returning again and again to what drives me in my Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work at Canopy and also in my work to promote justice in the world.
Our mission here at Canopy is to to build a more just and anti-racist world through relationships, creative processes, and love.
This mission resonates so deeply with me. 2023 was a hard year in so many ways. We have seen and continue to see so many examples of people turning away from one another and failing to recognize the humanity in one another. I believe at my core that the way to heal our deeply broken world is by building connections across differences. By turning towards one another with humility, care, and you guessed it….love.
This is what gets me out of bed every day and keeps me showing up for myself, my family, my team, and my clients. And fostering this type of deep connection is the core of what we do at Canopy. It is also fitting that we are beginning this new endeavor focusing on love on Valentines day!
When we share our mission with prospective clients we often get a big positive reaction to the word love. It is unusual to hear the word love in the context of business. However love could not be more important in designing the workplaces we need and deserve.
“Love compels us to envision a better world and better ways of being together”
Love allows us to really see, hear, and care for one another. Love is what makes space to see our own imperfections and turn towards self-growth. Love drives us to show up, try something new, and work towards a more loving workplace and world.
One of the main ways we express love is through our relationships. One thing we see over and over again is that people want to be known, understood, and cared for at work. Investing in one another creates a bond that supports self-actualization and benefits the individual, the team, and the organization.
How does all of this land for you? We invite you to consider:
Where can you infuse love into the work you do and the teams you work with?
Where can you deepen and invest in relationships in your organization?
We'd love to hear your answers to these questions, so please send us a note and let us know what comes up for you.
With love,
Naqibah, Debbie, and Tessa
How To Work With Us
At Canopy all of our learning opportunities are infused with relationship building and love. Whether it's a workshop, team coaching, a community of practice, or any of our other offerings, we create spaces for your team to come together in dynamic and unexpected ways, to get to know one another more deeply, and to generate solutions to shared challenges. And we make space for fun too! Equity work is hard and it can be joyful. We laugh often and love hard.
We are here to support you. Sign up for a 30 min inquiry call to learn how we can bring creative processes, relationship building, and love to your organization.
Canopy Updates
We have been reflecting on all of the amazing partnerships we had in 2023. We are so proud and grateful for all of the organizations and individuals we have had the pleasure of working with. We often say, and it's true, that we learn as much from our clients as they do from us! As we move into this new year we want to celebrate all of the accomplishments our partners have already made!
Here’s a sampling of some of the amazing engagements we’ve had with our partners over the last year.
We also instituted our first internal work week where we didn’t schedule any client-facing meetings and focus on needed prep work, internal business processes, and designing exciting new offerings (stay tuned… coming soon). We’ll be instituting an internal work week once a month as part of our ongoing effort to bring sustainability and more space for creativity into our work.
