Chelsea Viteri - Co Founder of Mazorca Facilitation

Expertises

Facilitation

Languages

English

Spanish

About

A little bit about me

I am a St. Louis-based Ecuadorean educator, researcher, activist, and artist with extensive experience working with diverse populations in Latin America and the United States. I'm a skilled group facilitator with a Master's in Community Development and Planning from Clark University and several years of experience in social movement building, the NGO sector, and higher education contexts. I am passionate about using popular education and creative-based methods to create collaborative learning spaces, build communities, transform conflict, organize strategic planning, and further social justice. I specialize in themes of interculturality, transnational solidarity, anti-colonial frameworks and praxis, and intersectional feminism. As a scholar-practitioner, I am an active researcher. My 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.

Chel taking a selfie with around 15 people who are all holding tools after a day of collective work.

Services

Collaborative Learning Spaces:

Are you a leader or organization interested in creating a more collaborative work culture? Or do you want to imagine, design, plan, and execute a project or process in deep collaboration with others? Are you yearning for less hierarchical and more creative experiences where everyone's voice and ideas are heard and considered?

Yes! Then let me help you create a collaborative learning space! These "spaces" aim to generate a process where we can collaboratively create, learn, unlearn, or reimagine a particular project, approach, strategy, or the organization's work culture itself. This methodology is also excellent for conflict exploration and transformation. This proposal invites us to practice a more horizontal, creative, and relational process where we can all learn with and from each other, build community, and generate effective and resilient outputs.

Strategic Planning:

Are you a leader or organization looking for more creative, participative, and engaging methods to facilitate your strategic plan? Are you seeking frameworks that invite us to step away from "business as usual" logics and invite us to ask bolder questions?

I bring playful, creative, joyful, and relationship-building practices to strategic planning. Imagination, inspiration, and play are disciplines that have the power to transform our work profoundly, as they can foster a renewed sense of commitment and dedication to the mission. Building or revisiting your strategic plan is in itself a creative act that activates our imagination to make connections and plans for a desired outcome with our day-to-day efforts. My proposal and logic is that if we foster our sense of play and community, we become more courageous imaginators, invested team members, and detailed and strategic practitioners.

pencil drawing of a hand holding a forest

Creative Conflict Exploration and Transformation:

Are you a leader or organization that feels stuck or paralyzed in the face of an outside challenge? Have you tried several strategies, but nothing is really changing? Are you using the master's tools to dismantle the master's house?

Our world is experiencing multiple crises that are not going away anytime soon. Conflict and crisis are hard to navigate, yet they can be incredible opportunities for growth, relationship-building healing, and collective transformation. Humans, as collective creatures, tend to move to "solutions" quickly to avoid the "conflict state". Understandably so. Conflict is uncomfortable and messy. However, quick solutions rarely shift us in the ways we need. I bring tools, frameworks, and methodologies to explore conflict creatively, where we can become more comfortable with our discomfort and create room for more profound change and bolder solutions.

image of a group of people sitting on the floor in a circle with all their feet pointing to the middle

Creative Based Educational Offerings:

Are you a leader or organization seeking to engage in a justice-based education process? Are you curious about decolonization, critical interculturality, or epistemologies from the global south? Perhaps you have a lot of theoretical information about these topics but don't really know how they apply in the real world.

I offer educational processes that use storytelling, embodiment, and creative-based methodologies to explore themes of decoloniality, anti-racism, feminism, critical interculturality, and more. Creative and embodied methods are key to learning that seeks to generate change and healing. They support building community while having hard conversations and coming up with broader perspectives. Additionally, personal and collective change and healing live in our bodies, not only in our minds. These methods encourage deep reflection while inviting us to take a step further and actually allow for reflection to change us.

watercolor drawing of a community of women and kids building a path forward

Testimonials

"I had the pleasure of participating in a departmental workshop on epistemic justice co-facilitated by Chelsea in spring of 2023.

The workshop was conducted on Zoom and featured four monthly two-hour sessions. The first session provided an introduction to the concept of epistemic justice and an overview of the entire program. Session two zeroed in on the notions of epistemicide and radical listening as well as Catherine Walsh’s call to unlearn discourses and practices of rational modernity that perpetuate violence and systemic injustices, to learn to think and act in the fissures and cracks of colonial thinking, and to create collective spaces where seeds of change can be planted. Building upon Walsh’s decolonial praxis, session three explored the role of our bodies and collaborative story-telling as sites for social change and transformative epistemic justice. Finally, session four highlighted the collaborative process of nurturing the seeds of epistemic pluralism and recapitulated other main workshop themes. To prepare for each session we completed brief individual reflection activities as well as short readings, including a thought-provoking, yet very easily accessible article that Chelsea herself had recently coauthored (“Re-storying participatory action research: a narrative approach to challenging epistemic violence in community development”).

Although the workshop was solidly grounded on Decolonial Theory, it did not involve purely intellectual discussions. Instead, it primarily involved an experiential and embodied exploration of other ways of knowing, being, and connecting both with the issues at hand and with each other. After a brief presentation by Chelsey and her co-facilitator to review key concepts, the bulk of each session was devoted to hands-on, interactive activities. These included, among others, whole-group and small-group discussions, guided meditations, drawing, free writing, and mindful body movements.

My colleagues and I found the workshop to be extremely relevant not only to our department’s continued efforts to decolonize the curriculum and explore non-canonical epistemologies, but also to our institution’s commitment to anti-racism and social justice. The activities and discussions required a degree of honesty and vulnerability that in the hands of less capable facilitators could have felt uncomfortable or even too “touchy-feely.” Instead, we all found the experience to be substantive, energizing, inspiring, and deeply meaningful. In fact, we enjoyed it so much that we are hoping to enroll in a follow-up workshop next year.

Our very positive response to the workshop is a testament to Chelsea’s wonderful skills as a facilitator. She came across as warm, patient, knowledgeable, and enthusiastic. Coupled with her professionalism and refreshing sense of humor, her kind, welcoming, and open-minded demeanor put everyone at ease and set the tone for a collaborative exploration of the intellectual and affective dimensions of the issues at hand. All along, she gently invited us to push our boundaries while also honoring our different comfort levels. She was outstanding, and it was truly a pleasure to work with her!"

Josep Alba-Salas, Chair of the Spanish Department at College of the Holy Cross

"I am a community organizer linked to several spaces, including academic, cultural management, street dance, and the ancestral cosmovision ones. My life is grounded in collective creative practices that use art to explore our identities, collective memory, understandings, and intergenerational knowledge. I have facilitated several processes with Chel Viteri, and walking and collaborating with her is powerful. Between conversations, silences, gestures, deep listening, glances, and feelings she brought to me, I have been able to question, transform, learn, unlearn, remember, and dialogue about how I am situated in the world. The movement she embodies in her facilitation creates a kaleidoscope of possibilities to understand each other through beauty and subtlety without romanticizing these forms but being aware of the many manifestations of life. Reciprocity is something characteristic of Chel; she reaches every heart of the people who know her; she is a safe space, a bonfire where to take shelter. She creates a circular communication and dialogue in which we all become part of this beautiful learning and teaching. "

Erika Cordova -Community Organizer, Ecuador