We help organizations
operate with soul.
Our Core Values
Working from soul
We approach uncomfortable, messy, challenging, complex, and vulnerable realities with courage and kindness. We aim to be honest, to be humble, to work from depth and possibility. Our guiding principle is love.
Centering relationship
We seek to model the world we imagine. With each other, we build connection, demonstrate respect, and practice care. With our work, we continuously review and adapt what we offer and how we offer it. With clients, we support healing and evolution. We do our best to be authentic, responsive, and accountable.
Honoring intersectionality
We strive to build a world where all people are seen, treated with dignity, and free to express their full selves. Refusing to oversimplify the subtleties of human experience, we recognize and attend to the compounding effects of oppression on the identities of each person and group. We appreciate difference and work to build shared understanding.
Embodying integrity
We express our values in our lives, relationships, and communities. We strive to define and articulate the ideals of diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice, integrating them into our actions and ways of being. We have been involved in this endeavor for decades and are committed to engaging with this work as a lifelong journey.
Making change
We are dedicated to having a practical, meaningful impact. We aim to be accessible for a range of budgets and types of organizations, and for people of different abilities and learning styles. We ask for and integrate feedback. Offering resources, building capacity, and sharing a lifelong commitment to our own learning, we begin with self-study and inner work as a necessary foundation for collaboration, community education, and transformation.
See the Alma Partners Glossary for our definitions of key terms like diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and justice.
From our clients
“The staff and faculty at the Waldorf School of Philadelphia has been engaging with the Alma Partners course series, Fulfilling Our Promise: Becoming Inclusive Waldorf Communities. This series of courses has provided us scaffolding for creating a shared language, for goal setting and maintaining dialogue around anti-bias and anti-racism in a deep in meaningful way! Each course provides relevant historical and contemporary content and really encourages us to interrogate ourselves and our community. We are so grateful to you all for your collaboration and strong direction in this work. We will continue to work with the material and know that it will have a profound effect on our community.”
“Keelah Helwig and Vicki Larson have facilitated several roundtable discussions for Sunbridge Institute’s teacher education students and Collaborative Leadership course participants on the difficult and important subject of racism and oppression in our country.
They have led these discussions with both true professionalism and profound empathy, allowing those participating to feel respected and heard by their peers. Our program students and course participants have reflected back to us their deep appreciation for offering them this open, yet held space where they could safely express their own feelings and questions on this subject—an important step in the process of dismantling racism and oppression.
Keelah and Vicki’s commitment to this work and their experience working with Waldorf schools and communities allows them to speak with authenticity and a deep understanding of the crucial conversations we all must be having today. We are very grateful to them both for bringing their expertise to Sunbridge, and we look forward to continue working with them in the future.”
Jessica Heffernan Ziegler, Executive Director, Sunbridge Institute
Feedback from participants at Calling It Like It Is: Uncovering and Dismantling Racism in the Waldorf Movement (workshops in 2021 and 2022 for Sunbridge Institute):
“Joaquin is knowledgeable, open-minded, and makes difficult content accessible.”
“Meggan brought real-world applications to weighty topics, providing an anchor to our discussions.”
“Heather brought a warm and deep spirituality that was a treasure. Her segments were given with honesty and humility. Her sharing about how she's working with her class were useful and left me feeling that indeed - we are all in this together!”
“Keelah was amazing, as not only was she extremely competent and clearly experienced, but she brought a tremendous warmth to the work. Inspirational!”
“I was deeply impressed with Vicki's honesty and vulnerability in sharing as she did, as well as the kind way in which she guided the group's feedback. She was well-prepared and skilled as a facilitator.”
"We couldn’t have asked for a more supportive and expert team of people to work with our faculty, staff, and parents. Our mentors were warm, generous, incisive, and professional every step of our journey together. We are grateful to continue our work with Alma Partners into the future!"
“Thank you so much for the work you do! I am a Waldorf graduate, teacher, and now administrator. The work you do and how you do it is inspiring and helps me continue in and believe in the Waldorf movement.”
Christianna Riley, Pedagogical Lead & Early Childhood Teacher
Berkshire Waldorf School
“Identified as a strategic priority of our school five years ago, as well as a moral imperative, Shining Mountain Waldorf School took up the important work of educating our school community on diversity, equity, and inclusion. As a primarily White school in the White bubble of Boulder, Colorado, we had much to learn and much work to do in our striving to create a diverse, inclusive school community. A Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee mandated by the Board of Trustees was then formed with members of the board, faculty, administrative staff and school community, and our work began. It was clear after several years of working together that we would benefit from facilitated training to gain a better understanding of how to move forward.
Vicki Larson came highly recommended to us for her extensive background as a DEI facilitator, for her in-depth knowledge of Waldorf education, and for her work with Waldorf school communities across the country. In February 2020, Vicki facilitated a DEI workshop with our entire faculty, staff, and board over several days. Her warm, clear, compassionate approach to engaging the work with our community allowed us to openly discuss the challenges of racism and other inequities inherent in our culture. Vicki offered a well-formulated process, including a proposal clearly delineating the scope and specifics of the training; preparatory materials for participants sent in advance; presentations for all constituent groups; small group processing work with each constituent group; a means for evaluating current cultural competency; and an actionable plan for how to move forward with developing a diversity responsive pedagogy. We look forward to consulting further with Vicki and Alma Partners.”
Mary Eaton Fairfield, School Director, Shining Mountain Waldorf School