SECTOR: Legal Services/Criminal Justice Reform
EMPLOYEES: 30 full-time staff Birmingham
LEAD ORGANIZATION: Uncommon Law (Oakland, California)
THE CHALLENGE
When Expansion Meets Unresolved Harm
UnCommon Law provides essential services to people navigating California’s discretionary parole process. They offer trauma-informed legal representation, mental health counseling, legislative advocacy, and in-prison programming led by those with lived experience of incarceration. The organization comprises program, outreach and advocacy staff; attorneys and legal support roles; and administrative and leadership positions. About half of UnCommon Law’s staff have personal or familial lived experience with the carceral system.
The pandemic transition to hybrid remote and in-person work, coupled with rapid organizational expansion, took a toll on their team. Staff were navigating both the chronic stress of working within systems designed to harm the communities they served, and the acute stress of organizational growing pains during a global crisis. Pre-existing power dynamics intensified, capacity became strained, and morale declined. Traditional approaches to workplace culture—conflict avoidance, individual stress management techniques, and organizational restructuring—weren’t addressing the deeper patterns at play.
THE APPROACH
Building Capacity Through Embodied Practice
To support their staff through these challenges, UnCommon Law embarked on an embodied trauma-informed and resilience-oriented (eTIRO) Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Antiracism (EDIA) journey with Lumos Transforms. This approach recognizes that stabilization must come before processing, and that people need to be able to regulate their nervous systems and access a sense of internal safety before they can effectively address harm and build new relational patterns.
Lumos began with a comprehensive organizational assessment to precisely identify strengths, areas for improvement, and gaps in the agency’s culture and structure. This assessment examined not just policies and procedures, but how stress and trauma responses were showing up in the organization’s daily rhythms, power dynamics, and relational patterns.
Based on the assessment findings, Lumos recommended a six-part live virtual embodied capacity-building training for all UnCommon Law staff. This training sequence followed the Resilience Toolkit’s core progression. Over several weeks, the team learned:
- Awareness practices to notice signs of stress and trauma activation in their own bodies and recognize these responses in real time
- Discernment skills to assess whether their stress responses were helping or harming in specific situations—distinguishing between reactions rooted in past harm and responses appropriate to present circumstances
- Coherence practices including conflict resolution frameworks and communication strategies that could be applied when stress threatened to derail important conversations
- Relational capacity to examine past harms impacting current organizational culture while maintaining enough regulation to stay engaged rather than shut down or escalate
The training was explicitly justice-rooted, recognizing staff stress and trauma responses as adaptive reactions to working within oppressive systems. Rather than pathologizing these responses, the work built individual stability as a foundation for collective care and strategic action.
The organization then continued its eTIRO journey with comprehensive facilitation support for a multi-day in-person staff retreat in Oakland. Guided by Lumos founder Nkem Ndefo, the staff worked on personal and organizational values realignment, grounded in the shared language and embodied resilience skills they had developed through the capacity-building training.
With a rehumanized leadership team, increased trust, and improved morale, UnCommon Law collectively developed a blueprint for new governance, including workload and compensation adjustments for leadership team members. The new plan included implementation scaffolding that can be revised and adapted for continued organizational growth.
THE RESULTS
From Reactivity to Responsive Leadership
UnCommon Law’s commitment to embodied, trauma-informed capacity building has resulted in measurable changes within the organization:
- Strengthened leadership capacity: Leadership team members can now recognize their own stress activation patterns and choose coherence practices when facing high-pressure decisions, rather than defaulting to micromanaging or other stress-driven behaviors.
- Improved relational culture: Staff gained the ability to notice when defensive responses or appeasement patterns were emerging in team dynamics, and could apply real-time regulation strategies to stay present during difficult conversations. This didn’t eliminate conflict, but it made productive engagement with conflict possible.
- Sustainable governance structures: The new governance blueprint reflects values that staff could only articulate clearly once they had enough internal stability and safety to think creatively about what they needed. This shift from survival to possibility is what the Toolkit progression enables; transformation becomes accessible once people have awareness, discernment, and coherence in place.
- Ongoing commitment to practice: UnCommon Law continues to engage Lumos in consultation, capacity building, and technical assistance on topics including conflict resolution, ethical uses of power, organizational values integration, and leadership development. They understand that building alchemical resilience—”the flexible strength and increased capacity to overcome adversity, heal, and change harmful relationships and systems of oppression and inequity into places where we thrive”—is an ongoing practice, not a one-time intervention.
As one staff member reflected: “We learned that our stress responses weren’t the problem. They were adaptive to impossible conditions. But we also learned we could choose different responses when those old patterns weren’t serving us anymore. That discernment changed everything.”
CONCLUSION
Stabilization as the Foundation for Justice Work
UnCommon Law’s journey demonstrates a crucial principle: Organizations committed to justice and liberation need embodied practices that match the intensity and complexity of their work. Traditional wellness approaches that focus only on individual stress management—encouraging meditation or self-care without addressing power dynamics or systemic harm—fall short when people are navigating chronic instability and oppression.
The eTIRO approach meets organizations where they are, offering practices that create stability without requiring circumstances to change first. For UnCommon Law, this meant staff could begin regulating their nervous systems and addressing relational harm even while continuing to work within the deeply harmful carceral system.
By grounding their organizational development in the Resilience Toolkit framework, UnCommon Law built the foundation for sustained change. This isn’t the end of their journey. It’s the establishment of practices and capacities that will continue supporting their mission of ensuring that incarcerated people have access to healing, justice, and effective legal representation.
UnCommon Law is demonstrating that when organizations commit to building embodied resilience, they create the conditions for people to stay connected to their personal and organizational values, to one another, and to their shared purpose—even in the face of ongoing adversity.
