About Ada

[Pronouns: she/ her/ they/ them]

Ada Palotai is a mixed race woman of color and a strategic thinker grounded in the value of relationships.  She has nearly 20 years of experience in a multitude of areas including, but not limited to: providing consultations and facilitating workshops and trainings on a myriad of topics ranging from healthy relationships to trauma-informed care/services to cultural responsiveness/humility to anti-oppression and racial equity; developing and evaluating programs and curricula; executing major change initiatives; and designing best practice policies and approaches.  She has a strong community organizing orientation with deep expertise in working with both complex systems – criminal justice, education, healthcare, child welfare, housing, etc. – and with a variety of communities – communities of color, other historically marginalized communities, immigrant and refugee communities, rural communities, and communities with a high percentage of members who speak languages other than English.  Ada’s recent work included a California-based research and language justice project in which, through the intentional creation of multilingual spaces, members of historically marginalized communities built their capacity to conduct research in, by, and for their own communities.  In some of her other community-facing work, Ada has co-led large-scale and multi-site community engagement efforts and community resource mapping projects, all of which have utilized participatory tools such as focus groups, listening sessions and validation sessions as their primary methodologies.  

Ada brings the gifts of super-connecting, truth-telling, and getting down to the crux of problems, giving her the ability to gain and maintain the trust of diverse groups of stakeholders and help them find common ground, all of which help make change efforts more effective and sustainable.  Furthermore, she possesses the acumen needed to discern between, and the nimbleness necessary to address both emerging technical problems and adaptive challenges.  Now called to the intersections – of violence prevention and racial equity, of organizations and organizers, of the scientific and the sacred – Ada is rooted in the power of collaboration and network weaving, and explores embodiment practices as vehicles for individual and collective healing, transformation and liberation.