Coaching

I love seeing the surprised faces, while feeling the energy in the room, as participants practice the use of coaching skills to help uncover truths and support each other in reaching both the goals they set out to reach and more than they imagined! I am excited to discover things about myself and my co-facilitator as we make and hold collective space in a learning community

Johnny (he/him) comes to systems change work with roots in youth advocacy, multi-racial LGBTQ community organizing, and HIV/AIDS activism. For 15 years he headed nonprofit health agencies in New York and San Francisco; since 2010, he has channeled his values of interconnectedness, justice, and healing as a certified coach, trainer, facilitator, and co-founder of the WithIn Collaborative. His current accompaniment work — whether with individual leaders, teams, or cross-sector networks — encourages us to stay authentic and vulnerable, and to disrupt oppressive cultural norms by sharing power and redirecting privilege.

Johnny moves through the world sourcing in part from his intersectional experiences as a cisgender queer Filipino man, adoptive parent, youngest child in an immigrant working class family, Gen X’er, and Buddhist practitioner. He cultivates joy and hope through a range of practices including memory work, writing, figure skating, and the perpetual study of language and languages. He lives on unceded Huchiun Ohlone Land (East Oakland, California).

Belma learned about the civil rights, Black Power and Chicano movimientos on TV, as a working class, latchkey kid in San José, California. This led to participation in anti-war demonstrations, school walkouts and canvassing door-to-door. As a founding member of the WithIn Collaborative she continues to pursue her lifelong commitment to equity, liberation and love.

In 2005, Belma became one of the first people of color from the nonprofit sector to become a certified coach and began working 1:1 with BIPOC social justice activists. In 2010, she joined the faculty of a coach training organization. She co-led fourteen 9-month long coach training cohorts resulting in about three hundred coaches, most of whom are BIPOC social justice leaders.

Alongside her work with WithIn, Belma coaches with numerous leadership programs as well as co-director/leadership teams. She worked in nonprofits for 26 years, including a community-based clinic and a leadership program for women’s health leaders.

Belma identifies as Chicana/Mestiza with light skin privilege and, with humility, as La Madrina Chingona, (“Badass Godmother”) a nickname given her by trainees. She is California-born, with ancestral roots in the borderlands. Married twice, widow and a wife to musicians, she lives in Oakland, California. Most proudly, she is the god mother to six god kids who inspire all that she does.