(310) 339-0609 markfairfield@me.com
Mark Fairfield

Mark Fairfield

Executive Leadership Coach & Organizational Consultant

Welcome!

While you’re here, scroll down and check out my work.

I offer leadership coaching, organizational consulting, team development and training. I have an abundance of experience and a deep commitment to working for a more humane, equitable and healthy world. If my values resonate with you, I want to connect with you.

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“My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.”

Archbishop Desmond Tutu Nobel Peace Prize Winner

Why Leadership?

I look to leadership as an outcome because I have learned that it’s in our capacity to lead that we find hope, value and connection.

But leadership always starts with a struggle.

Without challenge, we can’t learn about what matters most. Our big challenges wake us up. They make us appreciate the stuff we’re made of. Then, when we know what’s really important, we have something to offer.

My role is to remind you that you are not alone. You do not come through struggle by yourself. Your resilience is activated by other people…who rely on you to go through struggle. And that, in turn, gives them a reason to step into the struggle with you.

Right now, you may face an important choice. When you get clear about the stand you want to take, inevitably there will be others who will stand with you. I can be one of them.

leadership-leader

“If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.”

–Maya Angelou
Poet, Memoirist, Civil Rights Activist

My Services

Executive Leadership Coaching

Ultimately, the only changes you can sustain are the ones you persuade others to maintain with you. So whatever challenge you face, you’ll need to find your leadership and put it to work. My part of the equation is to coach you toward your greatest leadership potential, given your circumstances and resources. Usually an initial contract involves a 6-month commitment with a monthly retainer to cover up to 4 hours of in-person or remote coaching. Your goals will be related to your work or community, though some focus can be given to personal development if appropriate given the terms of the contract. Whatever the scenario, coaching can be a powerful force for transformation.

Organizational Consultation

This service primarily targets groups, communities and organizations undergoing a specific change effort. I can be an ally who comes alongside your team and offers tools and strategies. I can also offer leadership coaching, but focused on the team efforts rather than individual goals. Length of service depends on the scope of your change effort and the size of your system. Areas of focus can include leadership development, team building, values alignment, supervision and staff development, culture shift and capacity building.

My Story

RIn addition to my private work, I am the Founder and former Executive Director of The Relational Center, a nonprofit community organization that exists to rescue and preserve the important social ties humans depend on for health and well being. With an amazing team of staff, volunteers and collaborators, I have labored to develop innovative tools that promote healthy social connection. I believe we need robust community networks, especially as we face economic, environmental and political crises. So I look for opportunities to build intentional culture, share leadership, and promote resilience. silence-equals-death-keith-haring-posterAs I was completing my Masters Degree in Social Work at Columbia University in 1995, I got inspired to join the fight against AIDS. My experience in that movement helped me see how much mutual care contributed to enriching so many lives. I understood that the movement itself, with its strong emphasis on collaborative action and wider-thinking, had catalyzed vitality and well being by supplying a social infrastructure that encouraged people to look after one another. Since that time, I dedicated my career to helping people find solidarity and shared purpose. My own leadership comes out of a sensitivity to the pain of isolation and separation and the injustice of marginalization and exclusion. I am convinced that we must rescue our ability to depend on each other… to ensure our own sustainability and the health of our world.

Culture Shift

A Leadership Development Program for Change Makers

The Challenge

As we deepen our understanding of the threats we as humans face in our quest for enduring life on this planet, we continue to bump up against a challenge that grows increasingly harder for us to ignore. We know we need to coordinate more effective action to realize conditions of justice: environmental health, economic parity, and social and political equity. But we will continue to replicate forms of injustice as long as our culturedoes not explicitly embrace the values on which the quest for justice is founded. Yet culture can be elusive. It’s hard to see it, let alone change it. It is the proverbial water we swim in. The water is murky. It needs changing.

The Solution

Culture reflects values. Values are how we assess what is worth protecting, even when it costs us significantly. Values are what we defend…what we stick our necks out for. The culture we are proliferating every day by organizing all our actions around buying and selling is a culture of consumerism. That culture will eventually distract us from the values of justice we hold dear. So we need to define the kind of culture…habits and customs and practices and rituals…that actually embodies our values. Intentional culture requires that we critique the dominant culture, generate alternative narratives that frame our purpose and future, and participate in daily rituals to keep us engaged in that vision.

The Program

This program brings together community builders, scholars, educators, students, caregivers, and healers from diverse fields. It targets change-making institutions and networks with strategies and tools for shifting the culture of their organizations, supporting their stakeholder communities to strengthen bonds with key allies and anchor their work in structures that align with their core values. Through an individualized design tailor-made for each organization, participants find new ways to prioritize the health and durability of the relationships they rely upon most and then leverage that resource to protect commitments to solidarity and collective action.

The work of this program interfaces with allied projects across the globe, including Relational Uprising and Abundance Leadership Consulting here in the US, Relational Change in Europe and UK, and The Relational Institute Australia.

“Mark Fairfield has provided TRIA with leadership training and consultation. We have seen his approach inspire and encourage individuals to think more systemically and collectively. His focus on a shared leadership model has resulted in students taking initiative to design and foster activities such as a student clinic and a student-mentoring program. TRIA now has a very mature and inclusive culture, something that is not usual in a Higher Education accredited Institute. I believe it is this dynamic culture that supports our sustainability in the face of the ever-changing field of Higher Education.”
Ashleigh Power

Director, The Relational Institute Australia (TRIA)

“Mark Fairfield is a ‘hidden gem’. His work on creating a Culture for Radical Engagement has brought a perspective and  practices to the Gestalt Institute of Cleveland that many of us have been seeking for years. Gestalt in its founding was positioned as an ’emancipatory psychology’ and many of us have felt Gestalt has not fully lived into this vision. This work and training with Mark feels like, for the first time, we have begun to shape a vision and some practices with the potential to support social justice and social activism as an integral part of Gestalt practice.”
MaryAnn Kraus

Faculty, Gestalt Institute of Cleveland

“For the past 2 years the Radical Aliveness Institute has been working with Mark Fairfield to help vision, build and grow the Radical Aliveness Institute, community and movement. Mark is beyond exceptional. He is a mover. He is committed. And he will help you manifest your best and most powerful vision. He is one of those unique finds – a visionary, an ally, and a man who truly cares. If he works with you, it means he believes in you and if he believes in you, count yourself exceptionally blessed.”
Ann Bradney

Executive Director, Radical Aliveness Institute

My Fees

How I Set My Fees

The income from my fees compensates me not only for my current needs but also to recover costs I incurred while accumulating my education, credentials, and professional licenses. I am deeply connected to economic justice values. So I recognize when the pursuit of compensation simultaneously limits access for some. Therefore I want to make my financial motivations transparent. I have devoted much of my professional career to the nonprofit sector. It is there that I focus on lowering barriers to access. That continues and will endure to the end of my life. But what I earn there does not adequately address the unrecovered costs. So I bridge the gap through my work in the private sector. Which is why my fees for private work are not discounted.

Service Rates

Private Rate
$400 per hour

Corporate Rate*
$600 per hour
$2,000 per half day
$3,000 per full day

(*nonprofit discounts available depending on organizational budget size)

Corporate Rate*
$750 per hour
$2,500 per half-day
$4,000 per full- day

(*nonprofit discounts available depending on organizational budget size)