emerge/flourish was born from my own journey working with founders, legacy leaders, and their teams, as well as my own experience as a founder. I’ve seen the tension of holding the vision: the balance between nurturing it and letting it go.

I learned that for a vision to grow, we must release it and let it transform us. Some have called me an organizational whisperer or oracle. I call myself a healing-centered organizational development advisor. I am often the trusted peer who offers grounding and affirmation; and yet, who can also speak hard truths with care. My passion is to tend the people who are leading liberatory visions.

Through emerge/flourish, I offer a call and response to nurture the people so their visions can emerge and flourish.

I came to understanding my unique gifts through my legal training. I realized that I was a natural mediator with the capacity to hold complexity with care and curiosity. I found myself drawn to the ways that people and organizations move through challenge and change.

After law school, I supported several grassroots organizations in stages of start-up and growth. I also worked with grassroots organizations in tender times of decline, ending, and closure. While I understood the transaction side, my passion for the interpersonal is what sparked my own leadership journey within grassroots organizations. This included developing a legal aid program for people impacted by the criminal legal system. As opposed to a clinical approach, I took a holistic, relational, power building approach centered in care. It solidified a personal ethic that I called an applied embodied practice.

Later, I deepened this applied embodied practice through an individualized masters program, where I studied embodiment through the lens of my family lineage, Black feminist theory, and interdisciplinary art practice. Out of that came my healing centered-approach to organizational development (weaving study, lived experience, and ancestral wisdom). The coaching I share was also developed during my masters studies and has been refined through ongoing study, practice, and supervision.

The core of my theorizing is that through supportive containers of care, we can (re)connect with our inner wisdom, nourish our imaginations, and co-create just, liberative futures.

“Mitzi understands the way I think - both strategic and creative and has a sweet balance of spiritual too which I have not experienced with many other consultant/coaches in the past.”

“Mitzi has a kind warm energy that draws you in.”

“The legacy of my work with Mitzi was becoming more embodied and strategic in the ways I navigate the world.

“Mitzi creates an environment and a strong container for grounding, reflection and collaboration.”

“She creates a space to move through tension from a place that is heart centered.”

“I would say that Mitzi is an organization whisperer who hears all voices and helps to weave them together into a coherent choir, complete with music notes.”

I am an artist at heart who is in love with language. My aunt thought I might become a linguist. I’ve found my home within poetics. I like to play with finding alliterative word pairings and rhyming words when sharing ideas and frameworks. It gets me out of my own head and into the felt experience I desire to share. I see my work as a poetic practice; bringing awareness and language to our felt experience and future longings.