bluelight academy of the liberatory arts is a versatile learning community bringing people together to catalyze a shift towards a more compassionate and creative society. bluelight academy was created by Spring Up in 2020 and hosts webinars, retreats, and self-guided courses created and facilitated by Spring Up collective members in spring, summer, and fall terms available to the public and to private cohorts.


Our theme at bluelight academy for 2026 is “generative conflict” - as a worker cooperative team of transformative justice practitioners, mediators, and organizational consultants we have first hand experience moving from fear or destructive conflict tendencies into creative, grounded, accessible, and safe practice to address conflict.

About Our Pedagogy, Approach & Values


bluelight academy of the liberatory arts is a meditation on liberation designed to center the freedom of everyone involved: from students, to curriculum designers, to teaching artists and coaches. There are no requirements in any of our courses because your journey of unlearning and evolving is dependent on your choice to embrace it at the pace that aligns with your capacity and commitment. These courses are Spring Up's ode to liberty and consent, each one encompasses a collective vision and song that we invite you to join us in.

We believe in the power of the liberatory arts, and use storytelling and dialogue to facilitate trauma-informed personal and collective transformation. We view education as a mutual process- everyone has wisdom to share and something to learn. We honor this through the methodologies we use to design, develop, evaluate, and adapt. We use human centered design to generate our courses, emergent strategy to respond organically to the needs of our learning community, and participatory action research to lift up the wisdom of all participants in evaluating and collectively designing the future we desire.

The Spring Up Collective


Spring Up is a Black and Queer-led a collective of care workers, transformative justice practitioners, liberatory educators, and coaches practicing and teaching the liberatory arts here at bluelight academy. We operate as worker-cooperative rooted in the values of consent, accountability, and transformation. For over 10 years, Spring Up has used fiction, art, role play, and community education to popularize the skills and frameworks necessary to be free together.  Explore our catalog of webinars, retreats, and courses below.

If you are looking for a lower cost way to support this work and receive access to resources and coaching consider joining our patreon community. You can also get updates about our collective and projects on instagram by following @timetospringup.



Want to learn more? Enroll in our free webinar series: The Spring Up Approach where you'll get access to all of our free webinars that define our values, theory of change and share more about how we practice living into those values as a cooperative.

Liberatory Conflict Mediation Cohort

Abolition means it’s up to us to move in when conflict and harm arise.

Deadline to apply: January 23rd, 2026

Do people tend to turn to you when they experience conflict? Have you been mediating conflict, but are looking for more abolitionist skills and community to strengthen your approach?

We are hosting a 60 hour certification training cohort program from January through December of 2026, bringing together budding conflict workers to learn from Spring Up and each other about how to hold spaces for conflict that invites transformation while prioritizing agency, care, accountability, and healing. Conflict mediation is political, and the reality is that most mediation training programs don’t focus on disability justice, equity, and power analysis enough. Learn from a team of queer, racially diverse, nonbinary mediators with over 25 years of experience in restorative meditation, community accountability, felony juvenile + adult diversion, and facilitating both in person and virtually.

Learn more about the program components and application here.

Sliding scale pricing • Payment plan options • Scholarships available upon request


Upcoming Spring Programming


Register for our upcoming webinars & retreats this Spring term at bluelight academy.


All webinars happen from 5-6:30pm EST/4-5:30pm CST/3-4:30pm MST/2-3:30pm PST. A captioned recording of each webinar is made available via our bluelight academy platform for registrants who are unable to attend webinars live or registrants who would like to refer back to webinar content.

(All past webinar recordings are available at the bottom of our homepage!)


All daylong virtual retreats happen from 11:30am-5:30pm EST/10:30am-4:30pm CST/9:30am-3:30pm MST/8:30am-2:30pm PST. Retreats are *not recorded* and include a 1 hour break during the live session, comes with a 1:1 or group coaching session to integrate your learning.

Free Webinar: Approaching Conflict Generatively

Jan. 16th, 2026- Our theme at bluelight academy for 2026 is “generative conflict” - as a worker cooperative team of transformative justice practitioners, mediators, and organizational consultants we have first hand experience moving from fear or destructive conflict tendencies into creative, grounded, accessible, and safe practice to address conflict.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

FREE

2026 Conflict Analysis Retreat: 5 Steps to Move from Reaction to Response

Feb. 13th, 2026- What skills do we each need to learn in order to make conflict a generative force in our lives? How can conflict prompt us to learn about ourselves, other people, and how the world works? We will be hosting this fully virtual daylong retreat twice in 2026. Join the Spring Up Collective and peer practitioners in learning the 5 core steps to conflict analysis through a case study. Participants are invited to sign up for our retreat on Friday, February 13th from 8:30am-2:30pm PST / 9:30am-3:30pm MST / 11:30am-5:30pm EST with a 1 hour break from 11:30am-12:30pm PST/ 12:30pm-1:30pm MST/ 2:30pm-3:30pm EST.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$525

We Got Us: Community Agreements and Planning for Safety + Care in Conflict Response

Feb. 20th, 2026- Many of our communities and workplaces have normalized having community agreements at the beginning of a training, program, or in their collaboration in general - but how do we make sure those can actually effectively be used once conflict and harm have occurred?

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

2026 Harm Systems Design: Non-Punitive Approaches from Organizing to HR Retreat

Feb. 27th 2026- How do we build the systems we need to non-punitively respond to harm? This fully virtual daylong retreat takes place on Friday February 27th from 8:30am-2:30pm PDT / 9:30am-3:30pm MDT / 11:30am-5:30pm EDT. It will be offered again on 7/3/26.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$525

Discerning between Discomfort + Harm: Somatic Tools for Centered Accountability

Mar. 13th, 2026- Learning, evolving, healing, and being accountable require discomfort. We need to be able to discern between discomfort and harm because discomfort is necessary for learning and shifting the status quo.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

2026 Practicing Cooperation: Power + Consent in Decision Making Retreat

Mar. 20th, 2026- How do we navigate power and difference equitably? This fully virtual daylong retreat takes place on Friday March 20th from 8:30am-2:30pm PDT / 9:30am-3:30pm MDT / 11:30am-5:30pm EDT.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$525

Patterns of Conflict Avoidance: from denying + minimizing harm to cancel culture + overstating harm

Apr. 3rd, 2026- People often quote that conflict avoidance is a tenet of white supremacy culture, but what does that look like in practice? And how do we interrupt these patterns without overcorrecting? In this webinar we will go through a map of 4 different flavors of conflict avoidance, from ignoring and enabling harm to jumping to conclusions and scapegoating rather than holding the complexity of a situation.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

In the spirit of popular education, Spring Up is committed to offering scholarship support to as many students as we can.

We offer our daylong retreats, webinars, and six-week courses on a sliding scale to encourage our community to engage in wealth redistribution and resource-sharing.

Our scholarship form is designed to prompt reflection and offer more context on our pricing structure, and also to give students an opportunity to request what they need from us.

This form can also be used for folks who are based outside of the so-called "United States." We recognize that payment conversion to USD can create an extra cost burden. Please use this form to let us know what you're able to pay in USD for our offerings.

Fill out this form to request scholarship assistance


Want to support us in being able to offer these scholarships? Become a monthly donor on our patreon: patreon.com/cultivateconsent

Pre-Recorded Webinars & Self-Guided Courses
Transformative Justice, Conflict & Harm


Resilience & Revitalization

Resilience & Revitalization is an invitation to deepen our relationships with what it can mean to be accountable to our needs, desires, and healing.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

FREE

Transformative Justice Intro Course

Self-guided intro to Transformative Justice course.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

Everyday Transformative Justice Webinar

This pre-recorded webinar explores TJ as both a philosophy of care and collective liberation, as well as a collection of practices exploring how we respond to violence and harm within ourselves and our communities. How can we begin to implement and embody the ideas and practices of Transformative Justice in our everyday lives?

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

Community Accountability Webinar

This pre-recorded webinar walks through the steps and roles involved in facilitating Community Accountability processes in response to harm, including resources to use along the way.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

Anti-Carceral Crisis Response Webinar

This pre-recorded webinar covers the basics of how to design and implement anti-carceral responses to crisis in our organizations and communities.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

Liberatory Love + Art-Making Webinar

This pre-recorded webinar explores approaches and practices that mobilize art as a tool for liberation paired with a visualization & art-making activity. Get access to the pre-recorded webinar today!

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

Binaries in Gender-Based Violence Response Webinar

This pre-recorded webinar focuses on dissolving the implicit binaries in survivor support.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

Strategies for Strategic Conflict Webinar

This pre-recorded webinar covers information and skills related to moving generatively through strategic conflict in collaborative organizing, co-working, and co-living dynamics.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$25

Harm Response Skills Webinar

This pre-recorded webinar explores how we can build and practice harm response skills in our collaborations and communities.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

Consensus + Conflict: Harnessing the Wisdom of Disagreement Webinar

This pre-recorded webinar explores common challenges when practicing shared decision making, the similarities & differences between consensus + consent based decision making, and how we can collaboratively make decisions together in a timely and efficient manner.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

Workplace Support + Organizational Accountability

Want more support for your organization? Learn more about our consulting services at gettingfreetogether.org 

Collective Governance: Sharing Power Through Sociocracy Webinar

This pre-recorded webinar shares what we've learned about collective and collaborative governance, including highlighting core tools, systems, and practices that we implement as a group and share with our clients through out consulting and training services. We also share about "Sociocracy," or "Dynamic Governance," a framework for collective decision making and internal structures for workload distribution grounded in circles, consent and feedback.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

FREE

Practicing Accountability at Work: Feedback + Evaluation Tools

This pre-recorded webinar shares tools for real and values driven workplace accountability at all scales, from daily feedback norms to formal annual evaluations. We bridge practices from sociocracy, or dynamic governance, with the philosophies of design thinking, disability justice, and transformative justice to adapt pre-existing systems and implement new norms that make accountability more explicit and achievable for teams of various sizes and structures.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

“That’s Not My Job:” Equitable Workload Distribution and Feminized Labor Webinar

This pre-recorded webinar explores how the invisibilization of feminized forms of labor (like emotional labor) contributes to burn out.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

Coops: Nonbinary Strategies in Capitalism Webinar

This pre-recorded webinar features Spring Up member-owners reflect on the processes and practices that facilitate cooperative ownership of our collective.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

FREE

Organizational Accountability Webinar

This pre-recorded webinar explores translating values into practice, practicing generative conflict, preventing and responding to harm without centering liability or the state, and responding to patterns of harm and conflict through emergent and adaptive organizational strategy.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

Holding Grief and Rage in Facilitation

This pre-recorded webinar explores how we can hold and make space for grief and rage in our facilitation.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

Meeting the Moment: Adaptive Organizational Strategy for 2025 and Beyond Webinar

This pre-recorded webinar explores how organizations can adapt to shifts in trend funding and evolving political landscapes.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

My Liberation is Tied to Yours: Race + Liberation Psychology Webinar

This pre-recorded webinar shares core lessons from liberation psychology about the internalization of oppression and what tools, practices, and facilitation strategies can support us in working together across difference.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

Balancing Sustainability + Access: Spring Up Revenue Model for Values Based Pricing, Scholarships, and Consistent Free Resources

This pre-recorded webinar hare our model for balancing accessibility and sustainability as a worker cooperative.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

FREE

Care & Consent

Want more personal support and care? Learn more about our 1:1 coaching and meet the coaches here: timetospringup.org/coaching

Care Labor Webinar

This pre-recorded webinar unpacks invisibilized and gendered labor including care, emotional, and reproductive labor.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

FREE

Cultivate Consent Workbook Accompaniment Course

Self-guided intro course to Cultivating Consent.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

Ecosystems of Care: Nature Based Models for Reciprocity, Support, and Alchemizing Trauma

Healing work is non-linear with ebbs and flows — you may have a breakthrough and with that may come another crack in the surface the dig deeper. How might we equip ourselves for this constant gut wrenching yet nourishing work? By creating an own ecosystem of healing. There is complexity within ecosystems, layers of nurturance, consumption, homeostasis, and diversity. We use the term ecosystem because all of these components will uphold your healing process — they inform and supplement one another.

Institute for the Development of Human Arts

Institute for the Development of Human Arts

$50

Safety + Care Webinar

This pre-recorded webinar is focused around collectivizing care work and examining consent practices with yourself when engaging in care work and is aimed towards advocates, organizers, crisis responders, therapists, teachers, and lawyers.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

Everyday Consent Webinar

This pre-recorded webinar explores consent as a key component in moving towards collective liberation as it allows us to identify our boundaries, meet our needs, and honor our care practices.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

Burnout Webinar

This pre-recorded webinar focuses on defining, identifying, preventing, and responding to burnout in workplace and organizing contexts. It offers concrete tools and resources focused on assessing for burnout, identifying patterns and tendencies related to diminished capacity, and establishing sustainable boundaries.

Spring Up Team

Spring Up Team

$50

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Fill out this interest form to collaborate with us


All artwork and illustrations featured on the platform were created by Zoë Rayor, and graphic design was done by shaïna m. caceres-doliny.