Meet Amanda Lindamood

Dear How Matters followers,

These are changing times. I spent two days last week picking up our yard and helping neighbors (or maybe even more, them helping us!) after a “straight line wind”, also known as a derecho, that swept through our neighborhood. It was a fierce reminder that these changing times require new strategies and a strengthening of our relationships. Who do we know we can trust and rely on? What relationships are we investing in to help us meet an uncertain future?

One person with whom I have been collaborating with for many years is co-conspirator and fellow organizational change nerd, Amanda Lindamood. We are taking our professional partnership “public,” and I am so very excited to have cooked up some online course offerings with her. Not only is she an astute reader of human and organizational behavior and how power moves in institutions or service-oriented settings, she is a gifted facilitator, writer, and caregiver specializing in child and youth development and postpartum doula care. She is deeply rooted in liberatory frameworks and lineages of anti-oppression pedagogy, and more important, practice and praxis, reflection and reflexivity. And most importantly, she is my trusted and treasured friend, from whom I have learned sooooo much.

One thing that Amanda and I do know about the future is that we want to be together, no matter where our professional paths take us. We know that change is slow, but that it is possible to craft more opportunities for shared discernment, agreements, and decision-making in the structures and systems we disrupt, rebuild, or create. We know that the reality of navigating oppressive systems in these times means that we have to find both flexibility and reliability in how we show up for each other. (Plus, we’re both Cancer Suns and Enneagram Type 1, so imagine us vibing with fierce love and purposeful care.)

These offerings we are putting out into the world together are a reflection of that. Please learn more about Amanda and her experience below, and we hope you consider joining us in one of our upcoming learning opportunities!

Warmly, Jennifer

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Amanda Lindamood is a postpartum doula, organizational consultant, creative educator, and freelance writer with multidisciplinary experience and training. She brings to contemplative leadership and crisis support a commitment to Black feminisms, womanism, spiritual depth, community organizing and children’s liberation, and lived and professional experience in complex trauma.

For the last eighteen years, Amanda’s relationship with work has been nurtured by Black women and gender expansive people, and an explicitly expressed commitment to anti-oppression. Her earliest educational experiences focused on independent studies and field work that enabled self-management. Her earliest professional experiences combined health promotion and community education, conducting participatory research to support sexual health initiatives and local community organizers. She’s been in close proximity to evolving and fast paced settings for work that require both broad subject matter expertise and an ability to learn through application. She received a master’s degree from the University of Maryland’s accelerated Industrial Organizational Psychology program in December 2020. Her consultant perspective is reflective of studying organizational systems and behavioral theories during a global public health pandemic, and continually integrating new trends in information that are contextual and current. She has applied experience honed in the fields of education, advocacy, child and youth development, organizational development, instructional design, anti-racism, violence prevention, behavioral health, and crisis services.

She balances a skill set in interpreting organizational behavior and a healthy ambivalence towards institutions. Her professional life is shaped by working in high stress and low resourced teams and infrastructures requiring rapidly shifting priorities and structure. They have often included toxicity, organizational trauma, and organizational change. Her program management experience combines training and supporting paid and unpaid contributors in leadership positions. In her work as a postpartum doula, she tailors her involvement to supporting long term caregiving cultures and mutuality between children and adults. She bridges her knowledge areas of creative and technical writing, public health, organizational behavior, child and youth development, complex trauma, and crisis support to emphasize responsive and multidisciplinary learning and environments.

Her super power is detecting patterns, understanding context clues and translating concepts in decisive and creative ways. She is drawn to design and participate in experiential and multi age situations for collaboration and knowledge production, and introduces processes that envision longevity and deep engagement over time. She balances being a present caregiver and skilled practitioner seeking to contribute authentically to a more nuanced relationship with work and care. Her thought partners have included the wisest children, intentional healers, snarky poets, poignant teenagers, traumatized communities, organizers, and authors broadening language for what is happening and what is possible in our world. She carries them with her into the spaces she’s invited to relate to intimately.

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Related Posts (from other trusted friends, mentors, and teachers)

Serving with Cultural Humility, by Silvia Austerlic

Leading From Love: The attentiveness that brought accountability & The encounter, by Rajasvini Bhansali

How to relate (Part I) & So that we can see one another (Part II), by Onyango Otieno

Fire and light, by Swatee Deepak

The cost of diversity without inclusion, by Rosebell Kagumire

When the fox guards the hen house & Dear Angela, by Angela Bruce-Raeburn

What now? Beyond the #OxfamScandal, by Marie-Rose Romain Murphy

How we treat ourselves, by Mary Ann Clements

The Voting Box, by Rasha Sansur

Brainwashed by the Do-Gooder Industrial Complex, by Shawn Humphrey