Meet Our Team
Guiding Threads Collective is a worker-owned cooperative. Our team has over 50 years of combined experience working with nonprofits, worker cooperatives, philanthropic organizations, collectives, base-building groups, farms, schools, spiritual communities, and coalitions.
Our cooperative is owned and staffed by a gender-expansive and racially diverse team of Black, Asian, queer, and trans facilitators. We bring a diverse set of backgrounds and work experiences, including organizing, nonprofit work, teaching, worker-ownership, mediation, and peer counseling. We are presently based in New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, and the Bay Area, and we work with organizations across the country.
ANANDI SOMASUNDARAM
Anandi (pronounced: ah-nun-thee, any pronouns) is a Brooklyn-based queer femme, caste- and class-privileged South Asian American facilitator, healer, and organizer committed to individual and collective liberation. Anandi’s experiences organizing in non-hierarchical formations deepened Anandi’s interest in supporting other groups and movements to create values-aligned, sustainable structures that can expand their capacity for transformation. Anandi has spent almost the last decade engaged in social justice movements at a grassroots level, through popular education, space holding, and dance. Anandi approaches facilitation and consulting work with warmth, somatics/mindfulness, humor and a love of process design. At present, much of Anandi’s work resides at the intersections of racial justice, economic justice, and healing justice. Previously Anandi worked in health insurance technology spaces, designing and managing population health programs.
ANNA KRIST
Anna (they/them) is a queer, mixed-race Asian American facilitator and mediator who supports individuals and groups in building sustainable, equitable movements for collective liberation. They first came to facilitation as a student while leading peer health education classes in high schools. They have since spent years working with a range of nonprofits, collectives, and service providers, gaining insight into the many ways in which organizations can thrive and struggle. As a facilitator, Anna brings a keen sense of clarity and humor to guide groups through learning and decision-making. Before working as a full-time consultant, Anna spent almost a decade working in the non-profit sector, including roles at the Center for Justice Innovation, where they developed programs that help people avoid criminal prosecution, and at the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, where they supported state and federal litigation for the expansion of reproductive healthcare access.
DWIGHT DUNSTON
Dwight (he/him) is a West Philly-based facilitator, hip-hop artist, educator, and activist who has brought his creativity, care, and compassion to homes, schools, community centers, retirement homes, festivals, and stadiums all over the country and internationally. Dwight loves people but not always their patterns, and is committed to uprooting the habits in himself that keep him disconnected from others and his vision for a more healed world. From a place of unapologetic hopefulness combined with 10+ years of training, schooling, and facilitation, he supports individuals and groups to learn, grow, and connect, feeling and healing through. Dwight is a Level 2 Certified Kingian Nonviolence Trainer, a certified SEED Mediation Trainer, extensively trained in Dr. Howard Stevenson’s practices on Racial Literacy, and has additional training in a number of other modalities that support him to think about healing and wholeness in individuals and ecosystems.
JANINE KO
Janine (they/them) trained as a mediator through the Social Justice Institute in Northampton, MA, and landed in facilitation via the solidarity economy, as a former worker-owner at Palante Technology Cooperative, where they came to love and obsess over the inner workings of democratic and non-hierarchical organizations–in addition to fixing people’s computers! They continue to do technology, operations, and digital security work in addition to facilitation, and also just finished their fourth season growing vegetables and flowers on the North Shore of Massachusetts.
SARA YUKIMOTO-SALTMAN
Sara (she/they) is a queer, mixed-race, Asian-American, Nisei Japanese and Anti-Zionist Jewish facilitator, educator, and artist who supports individuals and groups building towards just and liberatory futures. Sara’s childhood born and raised with class privilege as an Asian settler in Honolulu, Hawai’i, on unceded Kānaka Maoli land, fortified her lifelong commitment to dismantling systems of white supremacy. Sara first cut her teeth as a student organizer in St. Paul, Minnesota, rallying around the retention of adjunct faculty and staff of color. Since then, Sara has spent the last decade engaged in political education work in various settings including grassroots collectives, non-profits, early childhood centers, and schools. Most recently, Sara was a founding member of a high school Ethnic Studies department, developing and implementing a literary curriculum centering QTBIPOC authors. Sara is also a graphic-recorder and utilizes artistic recordings as a tool for consciousness building.
Interested in working with our team?
We’d love to get connected and discuss how we can work together!
