Mazorca Facilitation

Who we are: 

Mazorca Facilitation is a bilingual facilitation group dedicated to providing comprehensive support to social justice organizations and educational institutions. We offer holistic security, strategic planning, leadership development, and collaborative decolonial learning services. Co-founded by Chelsea Viteri and Zia Kandler, we have collectively facilitated over 200 workshops in universities and organizations over the past decade. 

Our offerings:

Holistic Security: 

Our approach to security is rooted in a feminist and antiracist framework, emphasizing collective care and community-based, context-specific facilitation. We address themultidimensional impacts of violence, helping organizations and movements find strategic and creative ways to protect themselves. We integrate digital, fiscal, and psychosocial security to ensure resilience, even in high-risk scenarios.

We are happy to support you to: 

• Design security plans for your organization through power mapping, context and risk analysis.
• Create physical and digital security protocols that are timely, realistic, and relevant.
• Devise individual and collective care plans to support and sustain your work
• Train you and your team on various holistic security-related tools, including emergency response, de-escalation, and risk analysis.

Strategic Planning and Leadership Development

We provide comprehensive and inspiring practices to support your organization’s strategic vision and leadership development. Our offerings encompass goal setting, leadership accompaniment, annual and multi-year planning, decision-making frameworks, design thinking, and team building. We focus on crafting practical solutions tailored to your unique challenges while creating space for reflection, imagination, and healing.

Our praxis invites us to explore deeper questions of justice, community care, and environmental and social impact. In a rapidly changing world, we believe that organizations and collectives must continually reimagine their futures to remain relevant and foster a more just and equitable world. Let us accompany you in co-creating strategies that build resilient teams and impactful leadership.

We are happy to support you to: 

• Reimagine your organization’s vision, mission, objectives, and timelines.
• Acquire tools to navigate internal conflict and power dynamics.
• Develop organizational policies and strategies for team building.
• Strengthen your facilitation tools for participative and collaborative processes.

Educational Offerings: Community-Based Learning and Unlearning

Rooted in community-based learning and unlearning as pathways to social transformation, we provide tools and frameworks that deepen engagement and strengthen communities. From reimagining curricula to unlearning racism, dismantling gendered dynamics, and using storytelling for justice, our approach moves beyond theory to a praxis that reshapes how we interact with the world. Our goal is to create educational experiences that are personal, collective, and structurally impactful, fostering meaningful social change.

We would love to support you to:  

• Explore how to incorporate anti-racist and feminist approaches to your work. 
• Co-create spaces for learning and unlearning that cultivate community and are committed to a decolonial praxis.
• Engage in participative methodologies that invite multiple ways of knowing and being.

Meet the Team: 

Zia Kandler (she/ella)

Pittsburgh-bred, Bogotá based social justice organizer and facilitator. An organizer for over 15 years, Zia specializes in designing and facilitating risk analysis with a differential approach to best support front-line communities. Since 2016, she’s worked in international organizations dedicated to accompanying human rights defenders threatened by state-sanctioned violence by facilitating spaces to create holistic security mechanisms. Zia believes that collective safety is constructed through creating co-responsible, community-based alternatives to militarized protection mechanisms offered by governments and is deeply passionate about accompanying organizations and communities in constructing these agreements.

Chelsea Viteri (she/ella)

Ecuadorean activist, educator, researcher, and artist, with extensive experience working with diverse populations in Latin America and the United States. Chelsea is a skilled educator with a Master's in Community Development and Planning from Clark University. She is passionate about using popular education and artistic expression for collective empowerment, creative conflict transformation, and furthering social justice. Chelsea worked with Pachaysana for five years in higher education-based efforts to decolonize education through intercultural exchange and study abroad. As a scholar-practitioner, Chelsea is an active researcher. Her earlier work focused on the gendered impacts of extractive industries in communities of Latin America. Current projects center on transformative justice, epistemic pluralism, and gender dynamics in intercultural and organizational spaces.

"Mazorca helped our team really focus in on what our community security resources are as an organization, and what we need to add or sharpen to improve our systems. Zia and Chels held each session with a lot of care, and asked questions that helped us get much more clear. They gave us a lot of ideas and resources that helped us strengthen our work. One of my favorite moments in working with our organizers after these sessions was when one of them thanked us for supporting their agency in their own safety. Mazorca really brought in holistic values around keeping ourselves and each other safe."

Misha, Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ)