OUR CONSULTING TEAM
Aarati [AH-ruh-tee] works with white and BIPOC changemakers to transform internal culture and structures and build effective, values-aligned strategies for change.
Aarati believes that change happens when we define the problem, identify skills and talents we can build on, and surface assumptions and values that drive us. She recognizes that people need help moving through the fears and conflicts that inevitably accompany honest self-exploration.
Over the past 22 years, Aarati has been shaped by her experiences organizing with other women of color as part of Incite! Women and Trans People Against Violence and for climate justice with 350.org, her mid-career experience as a stay-at-home mom, her training in strategic planning with the American Friends Service Committee, and her experiences as a grantmaker at Bread & Roses Community Fund in Philadelphia. Aarati’s experience has allowed her to make significant contributions to individual and community healing, solidarity-building, wealth redistribution, and strategic planning in support of community-led efforts to make change.
Aarati holds a doctoral degree in Community & Prevention Research in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Aarati is a dominant caste, dark-skinned, class privileged, Indian-American, immigrant, straight, cis-gendered mother of two who loves to grab an idea from the air and shape it into words that spark giggles, a tear, or a gentle sigh.
Aarati Kasturirangan
Partner, Core Consultant
Allison is a people person with decades of experience in bringing folks together to build toward common goals. She has vast experience in doing this in the form of resource generation (or fundraising) based on her many years as lead development staff for community-based organizations. Allison loves to help groups increase their individual and collective power through resourcing their work with an emphasis on grassroots fundraising.
Most recently, she has co-created Securing the Roots, a six month fellowship to build people-power through a resource generation, mobilization and reclamation framework.
In her work with Dragonfly, she enjoys facilitating groups of all sizes through an exploration of who they are and what they are invested in, opening up ways for them to stretch and find growth. With knowledge of organizational development, an eye toward strategy, and expertise in virtual engagement, she has been navigating the pandemic skillfully, bringing folks together even as we are physically apart.
Prior to her resource generation and mobilization work, she served on staff at the American Friends Service Committee, supporting social movements around the U.S. and globally. She also had the privilege of being a lead organizer of the first U.S. Social Forum, held in Atlanta in 2007. Allison has served on the boards of directors for a number of Philadelphia-based organizations.
As the first person in her family to graduate from college, Allison received her BA in Sociology/Anthropology from Earlham College and her MA in Sustainable Businesses and Communities from Goddard College. Born and raised in Philly and determined to raise her kids there, too, she is a member of the Kalmyk Mongol diaspora and is always excited to investigate the intersections of food, gentrification, race, class, and story-telling in her spare time.
Allison Erdneka Budschalow
Partner, Core Consultant
Amadee is a facilitator, trainer and coach who supports organizations and their leaders of color to move through conflict, center racial equity and justice, and fully express their power. Amadee knows that having good structure and process, being in right relationship with one another, and acting from a place of embodied power are keys to transformation in organizations.
Amadee guides movement-based social justice organizations to help align their strategies with their values and learn to use tools of collaboration internally instead of the tools they might use against their foes. She especially enjoys coaching Black, Indigenous, and leaders of color to connect to their gifts and grow self-confidence so they can embody their full power.
Amadee’s life experience as a Black woman and her time organizing and strategizing in social movement spaces (pro-peace/anti-war, reproductive rights, criminal justice reform, AIDS/health care) inform her work with organizations and leaders. She has a B.A. in Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and a Graduate Certificate from Temple University in Diversity Leadership based in the Transformational Social Therapy method. She is a trained mediator, a fundraising trainer certified by the Grassroots Institute of Fundraising, and is a Certified Professional Coach.
Amadee is passionate about wealth redistribution as Board President of Leeway Foundation, which funds all kinds of women and trans/non-binary artists whose work is in service to community and social change. In her spare time, Amadee promotes ideas and tells stories that revitalize a sense of what’s possible. She is a Usui Reiki Master and energy healer.
Amadee Braxton
Partner, Core Consultant
Barbary works behind the scenes at Dragonfly to support partners and associates to develop new tools for clients, and design change processes that center questions of power and deeply held values. Barbary was born and raised in Northern Ireland and understands how deeply rooted our human resistance to change is. She believes we need to imagine our way into the future, not as a place of perfect change but of messy adaptation, where it takes courage to let go of values that no longer serve us.
Barbary supports organizations to dig beneath the surface to discover the source of their resistance to change—most often a painful clash of values. She believes in designing processes that are loving and generous, that explore how we embody our resistance to change, and that are secured in concrete, practical improvements to organizations' systems and processes. Recently, she has been focusing on supporting Dragonfly's partners and associates to develop effective and creative racial justice and equity change processes.
Barbary's approach to change work is built on the Adaptive Leadership model which she learned at Harvard Kennedy School, where she got her Master in Public Policy. She also received a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from the University of Oxford, and a Bachelor of Arts in Law and Government from the University of Ulster. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She is based in Philadelphia. In 2020, Barbary began to paint, having never picked up a paint brush before. Like the people Dragonfly works with, she too is changing who she is, and how she can help change the world.
Barbery Cook
Partner, Core Consultant
Noah is an organizer, facilitator, and coach who supports movement leaders to have difficult strategic conversations, equips teams to pivot in shifting political terrain, and guides organizations to develop a transparent and accountable work culture.
Noah believes underlying organizational structures often lead us to succeed wildly or fail miserably. He asks incisive questions to get leaders looking at their work in new ways.
Noah was a founding campaign strategist at MoveOn. He directed the digital team at Greenpeace India. He has organized with other white people to uproot white supremacy, with other cisgender men to end heteropatriarchy, with other Jews for Palestinian and Jewish liberation, and in a cross-class, multiracial organization for health care as a human right.
He was raised on a solar homestead on Penobscot land (rural Maine) in a family passionate about transforming the world. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Amherst College, learned how the world works in Philadelphia, and recently moved to Nipmuc and Pocumtuc land (Northampton, Massachusetts) with his partner and two kids.
Noah T. Winer
Partner, Core Consultant, Managing Director
Rebecca is a strategist and practitioner who supports leaders at all levels of organizational life to make strategic and relationship choices with integrity in a racist world. They have given advice and support to political actors and activists on change, challenge and conflict for over thirty years, with attention to power relations and human relationships at the center of their work.
Rebecca, who goes by the pronouns they/them, enjoys challenging and being challenged, bringing their flawed, authentic self to the task of coaching a client toward their own authentic best. They are as eager to apply political principles to a group’s theory of change as they are to draw flow charts to represent it. They bring a sense of humor, creativity to imagine what is possible, analytical tools to help assess what is reasonable, and enthusiasm for helping a client tell a new story of change.
For fourteen years Rebecca taught in the peace and conflict studies program at West Chester University. Their book, When to Talk and When to Fight: The Strategic Choice Between Dialogue and Resistance (PM Press 2021, graphics and charts by Rosi Greenberg) echoes Dragonfly's approach to changemaking.
Rebecca is a white, non-binary, middle class, able-bodied queer secular Jew. They have a master in public administration with a concentration in conflict management from the Harvard Kennedy School, and a BA in writing and politics from Barnard College. Besides solving problems related to social change, Rebecca enjoys solving mechanical problems with wood, rope, turnbuckles and pulleys.
Rebecca Subar
Partner, Core Consultant
Sara works with organizational leaders, staff, and members to get through stuck places and navigate the challenges of organizational transformation.
Sara believes that to be most effective in bringing about the change we want in the world, progressive organizations need to become adept at embracing conflict, difference and contradiction. This means attending to internal dynamics: seeking out multiple perspectives, addressing power and other inequities, working through difficult conversations and designing new systems or structures to sustain more open communication.
Born and raised in South Africa, Sara became an anti-apartheid activist at a young age and remains passionate about her commitment as a white person to racial justice. Her specialty is creating the capacity to bridge differences and manage challenging conversations, along with integrating an awareness of interconnected systems of oppression and power dynamics into all aspects of organizational life. She has done this for the past 30 years as a facilitator, mediator, organizational development consultant and coach.
Sara holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Cape Town, in South Africa, and a M.Ed. from Temple University. She is also trained in the Gestalt approach to organizational development through the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland and the Gestalt International Study Center in Cape Cod.
Sara lives in Philadelphia, where she enjoys singing Broadway show tunes off-key with her partner and daughter.
Sara Joffe
Partner, Core Consultant
