THE SAMBAI CIRCLE
Collective change leadership consulting, facilitation, and coaching.
Helping mission-driven leaders, and the people they serve, to bridge perspectives, discern what matters, and find shared direction to guide systems change.
Based in Los Angeles. Rooted in Belize. Serving locally, nationally, and regionally.
THE ROLE
A partner and guide in alliance-building collective change leadership across differences.
The contexts vary:
Teams and departments redefining their relationship and shared commitments after major leadership or structural change
A multiracial coalition committing to common cause while honoring and working through real differences
Community and institutional stakeholders deciding fair and sustainable policies for managing shared environmental resources
In each case, our role is the same: to help people build trust, speak truth, and align with their real values, vision, and purpose.
MEET THE FOUNDER & PRINCIPAL
ALAN WESLEY GOFF
For twenty years, I have been a student of a central question:
How do people learn to relate, make meaning, and move together to shape a shared future across differences in histories, identities, perspectives, and relationships to power?
I first learned to care about this question growing up in multicultural Los Angeles as a second-generation Belizean American and the son of a labor and political organizer. I learned early on that the work of changing systems is also the work of bringing people into relationship across different ways of being, seeing, and knowing the world.
The question has led me to deep study and practice at the intersection of intergroup dialogue, social justice education, language and culture, and democratic leadership. My learning has taken me into classrooms, community leadership spaces, organizational leadership offices, and national development forums.
I was trained in the theory, design, and facilitation of Intergroup Dialogue under Ximena Zúñiga, and in democratic education and participatory leadership under John Rogers. I was also trained in the practice of Council in the tradition of the Ojai Foundation through the Center for Council, and participatory process facilitation through the Institute of Cultural Affairs. My learning and development was deepened through the NewGround fellowship in intergroup bridge-building and conflict transformation.
Alongside formal training, I have spent a lifetime as an independent student of deep culture — language, cultural philosophy, cosmology, spiritual tradition, and ancestral knowledge through which people tell stories, make meaning, form identities, and understand their relationship to themselves and the world.
Taken together, my life and work have taught me to pay close attention to the forces beneath the surface of collective life: social, cultural, and political dynamics; the interplay between conflict and collaboration; and the art and science of how people learn, change, and create through intentional human experience.
THE WORK
Group dialogue and collective change process support.
Guided by the principles of participatory leadership, and the values of equity and justice.
THE LENS & APPROACH
Bringing the right people into the room matters. Often, it is only the beginning.
When faced with the challenges of aligning across differences, leaders often respond with greater attempts at communication, persuasion, training, or management, but when people are navigating meaningful differences in perspective, identity, power, priorities, or interests, the challenge often requires a different kind of leadership.
The group may need to surface what it has not yet been able to see, say, or understand together. The right process brings experience, perspective, tension, and possibility into view. It creates space for people to deepen relationship, make sense of the larger context, wrestle honestly with difference, and discover shared direction.
Our work attends not only to decisions and outcomes, but also to relationship, context, and meaning. People need opportunities to connect beyond the surface, engage what is difficult without collapsing into avoidance or control, and integrate what emerges into intentional action.
A good process can produce a decision, agreement, or plan. At its best, a great process also changes how people see, what they understand, and what they know is possible.
THE NAME & ETHOS
Ths Sambai Circle pays tribute to the resilience, self-leadership, and living legacy of the Kriol people of Gales Point Manatee village on the Southern Lagoon of Belize.
The sambai is a communal ritual that brings people into a circle around a fire through drumming, song, and dance. Through call-and-response, the circle holds individual expression within the larger shared rhythm, memory, and relationships in community.
Gales Point is also recognized as the birthplace of Belize’s village council system, where Nurse Cleopatra White creates a form and forum for people to come together to exercise shared responsibility for the affairs and future of the village.
The Sambai Circle takes its name from the larger understanding of collective life: when the future is shared, the process of shaping it must also be shared.
The circle represents the simple conviction: the people closest to the work carry the knowledge and power to come together and take collective ownership of what comes next.
Moving beyond division, toward shared understanding and action is challenging.
Leading collective change is possible.
If you're bringing people together around something that matters, we'd like to hear what you're trying to make possible.
Share about the people, the questions, or the work this moment is asking for.