CARE IS A DISRUPTIVE LEADERSHIP PRACTICE.
AND CARE-BASED SERVICE PROVIDERs ARE LEADERS TOO.
I’m here to help rebellious, justice-oriented, and fiery care-based service providers to create businesses that reflect Equity-centered values, make their bodies of work visible and loud , and to legitimize care as a vital leadership practice.
The mission of my coaching and consulting practice is to, simply, make care a leadership practice. I believe that care-based skills are essential to creating leaders who hold a vision for the world that is not based in hierarchy, oppression, scarcity, supremacy, and shame.
In order to do this, we need a two pronged approach. One, helping care-based service professionals translate their care skills into leadership and building out their bodies of work. And two, by working with leaders in capital-based professions to integrate care skills into their business and management structures.
Because who says that helpers and healers cannot be leaders, cannot take a stand, cannot be well-resourced, cannot have legitimate bodies of work and massive impact on the world?
And who says that traditional leaders, business people, executives and administration can’t learn to lead successful groups and companies in a way that is human-centered, trauma-informed, affirming, and relational?
from the world we have now, to the world we want to build, YOUR WORK, YOUR VISION, AND YOU ARE NEEDED.
It’s time to lead with care.
I help therapists, coaches and other care-based service providers apply their natural helping and healing skills to entrepreneurship and LEADERSHIP AND disrupt the paradigms in their fields.
Those who feel deeply connected to their work and purpose but have a serious bone to pick with the institutions and systems in which that work is housed.
Those who are proficient in their professions, but overwhelmed by or skeptical of traditional business and leadership practices.
Those who are fed the f*ck up with being told they should let their time, energy, and money be a faucet and be sustained only by their compassion, but who can’t question those beliefs because that’s not how “good” care professionals feel.
Those who want to bring an innovative, rebellious, and justice-centered vision into their work, but who feel stifled by internal and external narratives around what they are allowed to do.
Those who are no longer willing to have their care weaponized against them.
WHAT I OFFER
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1:1 COACHING
Using the care skills you already have, we will work together to build the DNA of your business, by identifying your vision and voice, attuning to your clients, nurturing intentional community, and implementing sustainable time, energy, and money practices. Let’s build out a tangible body of work from your experience, and create practices to lead in your field and in the world that are trauma-informed, anti-oppressive, and liberatory.
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TRAININGS & WORKSHOPS
Book me to present on a specific topic or lead your team through a training. A list of potential topics can be found on my Services page, or contact me directly and we can brainstorm.
IT’S TIME TO MAKE CARE YOUR BUSINESS.
ARE YOU READY TO:
Create or refine your small care-based service business, rooted in rebellious, interdependent, justice-based values and practices?
Trust your frustation to guide your vision, values, and voice, rather than causing you to walk away from it?
translate the professional skills you already have to business and leadership practices like messaging, marketing, finding your mission, and creating sustainable work structures?
slowly build a collaborative, fertile ecosystem of care-based entrepreneurs?
Call in your clients through attuned messaging, based in your vision, strengths, and expertise, and sell to them in a regulated, consensual, high-regard way?
get trauma-informed, equity-centered support for the emotional and psychological ride of entrepreneurship and visibility?
Be loud about what you stand for and the problems and oppressive practices you see in your profession?
build out your body of work to create the services and business structure that allow you to share your message widely, sustain yourself, and iterate instead of stagnate?
The vision i hold is one of legitimizing care.
because care is the duty of all, not the burden of a few.
But our society often positions care and caregiving as a supporting act or “soft skill,” expecting much, but offering little, to those in care professions and personal caregiving roles.
When care identities are devalued, so are the time, money, and energy resources of the person giving the care. When care professions are not protected, they are exploited. When care becomes the assigned duty of a few, it can never become a culture-changing ethic for us all.
I see care-based businesses and care providers as leaders, visionaries, and the matriarchs of our world.
I truly believe that care-based professionals are natural entrepreneurs and leaders, we just need to do it our own way (high-pressure, hierarchical and manipulative just ain’t our thing).
I center care as a tool for power and leadership, center small matriarchal businesses as vehicles for justice and innovation, and center the care-based entrepreneur as a steward of personal and collective thriving.
THIS IS FOR:
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A pretty broad category, as there are many ways one can give a care-based service, including, but not limited to: therapists, coaches, birth workers, educators, sex workers, creatives, fitness professionals, stylists, aestheticians, health care professionals, and other assorted helpers and healers.
Please note that if we work together, it is expected that you have the necessary training, licensure, and/or certification to be practicing or operating in your field.
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You are aware of your identities and any unearned privileges or marginalizations you have, and are committed to creating a business that does not replicate or perpetuate oppression or injustice to yourself or your clients. You do not need to be perfect or have it figured out- I sure don’t- but you must be ready to reckon and untangle- even when it’s not in your favor.
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This is you if you are in the conception or birthing stages of your business. You have an idea, a dream, a program, or are just at your “fuck-it moment,” as my coach, Kelly Diels, likes to say. 1:1 coaching can help you cut through the doubt and confusion and supply you with the confidence, direction, and tools to get established without getting stuck in the planning stage longer than you need to.
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This is you if you already have your small care-based service business open to clients, or have an offer that you run…but it’s not feeling like you expected. 1:1 coaching can help you get louder and clearer with your message, call in your most beloved clients, audit your business practices and values, create a cohesive menu of offerings, or make sure you’re supported with some healthy margins.
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And this it you if you aren’t an entrepreneur or small business owner, but are in a leadership position (this includes thought leaders!). 1:1 coaching, using the Care Leadership Framework, can help you audit your workplace and leadership practices to create organizational cohesiveness and congruence, a robust body of work, and a lineage of justice-oriented, thriving care leadership.
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Disruptive businesses are based in equity-centered, liberatory, and trauma-informed values: collaboration, creation, wisdom, trust, nurturing, attunement, generativity, and conservation. Disruptive businesses are in opposition to patriarchal and supremacist business structures and practices, which are unfortunately the norm and model.
Hi, I’m Allison Staiger, and I’m a care-based business & leadership coach and consultant.
I want care-based service providers to use entrepreneurship and leadership in order to take a stand and care for themselves and their communities.
While I am currently pursuing a dual certification in Coaching and Leadership from the Institute for Equity-Centered Coaching, for the last 12-plus years, I’ve also been a clinical social worker who has built a successful private practice (twice) serving caregivers of all kinds: birthing parents, therapists, educators, creatives, birth workers, nurses, and other helpers and healers. I’m certified in perinatal mental health and an expert in treating trauma using an integrative approach. I’ve worked as a community mental health professional, a teacher, and a service industry worker, and I’m the eldest daughter and primary parent to my child.
Caregiving occupies a large space in my life.
Because not only do I hold these care-based identities, I am also the owner of two successful care-based small businesses (both of which started as side dreams), and I have seen time and time again how the messages we internalize as care professionals seep into our business practices. We weaponize the same outdated and oppressive narratives of what a “good therapist,” “good mother,” or “good helper” is against ourselves, and let them run through our bodies of work, our business practices, and our beliefs in who we are and what we are allowed to do.
As a therapist, I swung between feeling like I was assigned far too much power (sent here to save and fix my clients, while trained to only see their deficits), and feeling completely powerless to the larger systems at play (structural oppression, medicalized models of care, laughably low pay, student loans, time and energy expectations, and burnout).
But there was nothing wrong with me, just like there’s nothing wrong with you. What you’re seeing is the sad truth: care professions are notoriously unjust- to the communities they serve, and the providers they employ, to the culture at large. Your distress about this is potent and necessary, it just needs to be directed at the right targets. Once you can see that you aren’t the problem, and that you aren’t deficient, you can get mad at what is.
The Patriarchy. White Supremacy. Structural Scarcity. Capitalism. WEAPONIZED CARE.
I want you to direct your fury at them, so you can take care of yourself, re-claim what this work is supposed to be, and build a new culture of fierce care leadership.
Let’s imagine a world beyond simply caregiving:
Care collaborating.
Care creating.
Care leading.
Let’s make care your business.
WORK WITH Allison
TRAININGS & WORKSHOPS
I am available for speaking engagements and trainings on a range of topics, both virtually or in-person in the Chicagoland area.