Fellowship Facilitator Bios
Brooking Caldwell Gatewood is the co-founder and lead coach with the Emergence Collective. In her 15+ years facilitating social change and collective learning projects, she’s made a craft of inspiring powerful conversations that ignite social visionaries and help unlikely allies advance shared goals — for the environment, public health, democracy, artistry, social justice and more. At heart, her work is about co-liberation from systems of ‘power over’ and moving toward systems of ‘power with’ that honor individual agency as well as collective interests and wisdom. In practice, this work focuses on shifting culture across levels - from individual and team mindsets and behaviors to large-scale policy and systems change.
Both poet and scientist, she’s studied all sorts of wonders of being human together, from cell biology and systems thinking in Ivy libraries to psychology and meditation in canvas yurts and zendos. Her holistic, participatory, and researched-based approach creates rich and rewarding learning environments, and her coaching invites leaders into new depths of themselves and their work in the world. Some of her design work has been featured in the Stanford Social Innovation Review and Beloved Economies, and she hosts the award-winning The Indisposable Podcast. She holds a BA from Dartmouth College, a MA in Organizations and Management Theory (with an emphasis on movements and networks) from UC-Irvine, a MFA in creative writing from UMSL, and is certified in somatic healing, coaching, and mediation. She also has a MFA and a TedX talk on the power of poetry as a form of listening, collaborates with artists around the world, and hosts the Blizwell Salon in her hometown of St. Louis with her partner Karin Bliznik, where vulnerable artistry has been helping bridge social divisions in the city since 2022.
Case study highlight: from 2017-2021 Brooking facilitated the dSeries Executive Innovation Labs, which offered systems leadership training and practice for dozens of national leaders in the diabetes ecosystem. From this she helped leaders in this space identify the need to shift stigma - just as in the Harvey Milk era of the US gay rights movement - to unlock movement-level power on this national health epidemic. She helped build a team to run a creative campaign for shifting stigma, and was recently invited back to facilitate a learning session on this highly successful campaign, which just won an Anthem award for innovative approaches to health equity, using humor to shift hearts and minds.
Rachel Sinha is a systems coach, network builder, and strategist with more than 15 years’ of experience helping leaders make sense of complexity, build coalitions across divides, and move resources toward equity-centered change.
She has co-founded several ecosystems for positive transformation, including The Finance Innovation Lab, Illuminate, and The Systems Sanctuary, and has worked with leaders across philanthropy, civic resilience, economic mobility, climate, and community well-being. At The Systems Sanctuary, she spent seven years designing and leading peer-learning cohorts for changemakers working in climate justice, immigration, gender-based violence, public health, and more, strengthening their capacity, resilience, and strategic clarity.
Now based in St. Louis, her research on womxn leading systemic change in America’s “unsung states” surfaces the distinctive leadership emerging in politically polarized regions. She convenes a quarterly gathering for women ecosystem leaders in STL and is developing a pro-democracy music festival, Welcome to the U Turn.
Rachel’s facilitation and coaching draw from systems thinking, feminist and trauma-informed practice, and years of building global learning infrastructures. She has trained more than 500 leaders across six continents through programs with WWF, Columbia University, Ashoka, Turtle Island Institute, and others, and her publications, including in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Feminist Systems Change, and Womxn Leading Systems Change in America’s Unsung States, have shaped narratives on equity and systemic change.
A storyteller as much as a strategist, she co-created The Relational Podcast, exploring how to make the case for relational work. Honored as a BMW Responsible Leader (2024), she continues to support leaders in widening their aperture, deepening their practice, and building the relational infrastructure needed for communities to thrive.
A Sampling of Relevant Project Experience:
Systems Change Cohorts
Ecosystem Building for Systemic Change
Systems Coaching
Thought Leadership