We want to give feet to your dreams. Bring your vision to Counterflow so we can connect you with the people and tools to bring it into existence. We’ll help you build a supportive, not restrictive, framework for your dreams.

Using a creative participatory process that includes staff and prospective program recipients, we can help ensure that your program adapts to meet the real local need and takes advantage of the wealth of experience and expertise our community has to offer for an infusion that brings life to the work.

This tool, first created by Krebs & Holly, and customized by Counterflow, creates a visual way to analyze community links. It empowers all members of a community to connect and “knit” the network together. It intentionally elevates and centers the voices closest to the issue—who are most often closest to the solution in emergent work.

Network Weaving unlocks the stagnation caused by hierarchal rules that maintain the status quo. Instead, we create a paradigm shift back to the vital voices that are often left out.

The current mechanisms to present community work to funders and supporters often fall short of conveying the true healing that happens at the grassroots level of community-based work. Spreadsheets, graphs and words can paint only part of the story, and often the time, word count restrictions and technical requirements further stifle creative storytelling. Counterflow has partnered with Ben Phan to create Counterflow Media to center and amplify your story.

Counterflow can create clean, easy to use websites that center your story. Whatever service or product you’d like to offer, whatever style you fancy, bring your vision to Counterflow so we can create a professional yet affordable website that helps you increase your reach. Click on the links below to see some websites in our portfolio.

Operation Gateway

Deep Time

Ben Phan Studios

Bowman Collaborative

We connect people and agencies doing community work to the funds that will enable them to build a stable and solid foundation. We help you think beyond common avenues of funding to intentionally bolster financial support directly into your organization and the community it serves.

Counterflow will elevate your work and bring it to life by sharing staff and participant experiences with traditional and out-of-the-box data/experience collection methods. We help you humanize the challenges that gave rise to your organization and celebrate stories of resilience. Counterflow reduces the distance between people and powerful funding entities by weaving connections that inspire authentic investment that goes beyond economic support.

Using a creative mix of deliberative participation methods and the full array of qualitative and quantitative feedback, Counterflow will help you ensure that your program is evolving to meet the changing needs of your participants in sync with your local community ecosystem.

We center the “expert by experience” voice with an infusion of “expert by professional practice” and learning from what has worked elsewhere in the world in a similar setting. With this approach, you can be confident that your program utilizes shared wisdom from near and far while harnessing the local talent and meeting the nuanced desire and needs of your community.

To be a credible messenger in the community takes the caliber of expertise that comes from lived experience. The therapeutic value of someone who has overcome similar challenges to the population served is unparalleled. There has been recognition of this value in the front lines with an increased infusion of Peer Support Specialists and Community Health Workers in recent years. Yet when it comes to organizational direction and decision-making we see that, in order to have influence, lived experience needs to hide behind traditional education and power structures.

Counterflow has rich experiences successfully integrating Lived Expertise into Clinical and Social Work. This lets us unlock the insight of Lived Expertise with the right level of autonomy and support in every facet of an organization.

In a society that is often narrowly focused on effectiveness and efficiency, there is little time to orient ourselves and build relationships. We tend to stick with those who agree with us, or not speak up for fear of being excluded. Connection, creativity, and tuning in to intuition take time and space to share what is really going on. We help your organization find spaces to pause amidst the rush for efficiency, recognition and limited definitions of success.

From facilitated board retreats to finding regular meaning-making time for small and large teams, Counterflow will help you find the eddies to pause and connect, and the oxygenating white water to reinvigorate your flow with diverse perspectives.