Everywoman’s Leadership Program

The best way to strengthen an ecosystem, biologists say, is to connect it to more of itself.

The interconnected challenges we face require movements of women in leadership that are capable of reaching across and cultivating connections among the many differences that too often divide us.

Inspiring, strengthening and connecting the leadership of women – across cultures, orientations, generations, sectors and disciplines – is essential to facilitating the systemic transformation needed to shift our cultures, societies and civilizations. As is rebalancing the feminine and masculine archetypally in ourselves, our institutions and our ways of walking in and relating to each other and the world.

We also address rebalancing the masculine & the feminine archetypally in ourselves, our institutes, and our culture.

The program encompasses and integrates all of those areas, and operates through media, educational materials, and online conversations and convening.

Directed by Bioneers Co-Founder, Nina Simons

What We Do

Our times demand leadership skills that, above all else, employ innovative and relational thinking. Effective leaders now need to be cooperative and adept at bridging divides and forging alliances, while addressing power and privilege issues skillfully and with dignity.

Everywoman’s Leadership emboldens and strengthens the leadership effectiveness of women who are diverse in every way, and who are reinventing organizations, institutions and systems while protecting and defending the web of life.

After scanning the emergent women’s and gender equity landscape for 25 years, few others combine these aspects which we see as central to a whole-systems and intersectional approach to women’s leadership.

Katsi Cook and Eve Ensler
  • We recognize and confront the invisible biases that result from the inherently patriarchal systems we live in and sometimes internalize. We seek to examine and challenge male-centric frameworks that cause women and girls to doubt their own power, silence their voices, avoid conflict, limit their visions and leadership capacities, and compete against each other.
  • We are redefining leadership in terms that elevate factors and qualities usually considered to be “feminine” to arrive at models that integrate all genders and draw from our common humanity. Traditional leadership trainings often perpetuate masculine models of leadership by emphasizing ideals of hierarchy and dominance.
  • Our conference and media are more accessible to a wider range of women. We actively elevate the work of frontline, indigenous, women of color, immigrant, and low-income women, youth and elders, and women whose life experience and narratives may have greatest value to our collective learning and movement-building.
  • Our media features extremely diverse examples of leadership, activism and innovation – not only with respect to color or ethnicity, but also generationally, in terms of orientation and the sector of their work’s focus, that are rarely represented as models in the media. As Gloria Steinem notes “If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.”
  • We coalesce a diverse landscape of women’s organizations, leaders, projects and networks, raising their visibility and helping them to attract resources and partnerships.

We embrace forms of leadership that integrate the whole person, the intelligence of our bodies, hearts, minds and spirits, while addressing the archetypal feminine, masculine, and non-gendered qualities within us all. We increase the visibility of diverse leaders as role models, and host and lift up the edgy conversations needed to create connective tissue so that they may stand together across divides of race, class, and sector on behalf of justice and the sacredness of life itself.

Books & Educational Materials

Our media is influential, with radio, podcast, broadcast and social media reaching many diverse constituencies and tens of millions each year. Our videos and podcasts are readily available to educators and lifelong learners on our website, and they adapt readily for use in curricula at various educational levels – for women’s or gender studies, or cultural diversity, intersectionality, leadership or gender justice.

Nature, Culture & the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership

We are excited to announce that the second edition of Nina’s book, Nature, Culture and the Sacred: A Woman Listens for Leadership, is now available to order! 

Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons offers inspiration through essays, poems and profiles for anyone who aspires to grow into their own unique form of leadership with resilience and joy. Winner of the Nautillus Award for Women’s Studies and Racial Justice.

Informed by her extensive experience with multicultural women’s leadership development, Simons replaces the old patriarchal leadership paradigm with a more feminine-inflected style that illustrates the interconnected nature of the issues we face today. Sharing moving stories of women around the world joining together to reconnect people, nature and the land—both practically and spiritually—Nature, Culture & the Sacred is necessary reading for anyone who wants to learn from and be inspired by women who are leading the way towards transformational change by cultivating vibrant movements for social and environmental justice. Read an excerpt of Nature, Culture & the Sacred here.

Moonrise: The Power of Women Leading from the Heart

Through a tapestry of over 30 voices and stories, Moonrise (which was published to critical acclaim) illuminates how women and men are redefining the leadership landscape across a diversity of perspectives, generations and ethnicities. Read an excerpt from Nina’s introduction to Moonrise here.

Ecological and Social Healing: Multicultural Women’s Voices

Weaves together essays by fourteen multicultural women who are doing work that crosses the boundaries of ecological and social healing. The women are prominent academics, writers and leaders spanning Native American, Indigenous, Asian, African, Latina, Jewish and Multiracial backgrounds. The contributors express a myriad of ways that the relationship between the ecological and social have brought new understanding to their experiences and work in the world. Moreover by working with these edges of awareness, they are identifying new forms of teaching, leading, healing and positive change. Listen to an episode of Bioneers: Revolution from the Heart of Nature featuring three contributors to Ecological and Social Healing.

Featured Media

Videos

To see all program related videos, click here.

Radio Shows / Podcasts

To see all program related radio shows/podcasts, click here.

Books & Educational Materials

See all media related to Nature, Culture & the Sacred and Moonrise.

Articles, Essays & Transcripts

To see all program related articles, essays & transcripts, click here.

ContactAbout Nina Simons

Nina Simons, co-founder and Program Director: nina [at] bioneers.org

For information on Nina’s books, or to learn more about her availability to speak or be interviewed, or to explore the topics she often speaks about, please visit her website www.ninasimons.com.

For other general inquiries.

Nina Simons is co-founder of Bioneers and serves as its Chief Relationship Strategist. She is a social entrepreneur who is passionate about the power of women to transform the world, healing towards systems of racial and gender equity, indigeneity and rekindling a sacred relationship to nature, while co-creating a just transition that’s regenerative, loving and peaceful.

She speaks internationally and co-facilitates transformative leadership offerings that integrate Relational Mindfulness, Restoring the Deep Feminine, Indigeneity, Healing the Divides, and The Work That Reconnects.

Click here to learn more.

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