CAMBIUM
Who We Are
Organizational Development Consultants & Anti-Racist Facilitators Serving Mission-Driven Organizations Nationwide
Based in Washington, DC and serving nonprofits, foundations, and social justice organizations across the United States, Cambium Collective is a team of experienced facilitators, liberatory strategists, and equity-centered organizational development consultants. We specialize in supporting organizations experiencing leadership transitions, team conflicts, strategic planning challenges, and the complex work of aligning practices with values.
Our Approach to Liberatory Organizational Change
Whether your team is stuck after a conflict, your board and staff aren't aligned, or you're navigating burnout in your nonprofit team, Cambium Collective offers trauma-informed facilitation and anti-racist consulting grounded in an understanding of power dynamics and liberation.
We believe that to grow a just and equitable world, we need approaches to organizational change that lead to the transformation of ourselves, the places where we work, and the communities where we live. By doing this necessary healing work, it becomes easier for people to have their voices heard, to work at our fullest potential, and to create sustainable communities where everyone's needs are met.
Our team provides comprehensive organizational development for nonprofits, retreat facilitation for social justice orgs, strategic planning for mission-driven teams, and equity-centered consulting. We specialize in supporting food justice organizations, BIPOC-led nonprofts, faith-based organizations, land-based groups, and foundations working toward systemic change.
Meet Our Team:
Facilitators with Deep Movement Experience
Our collective brings together decades of experience in nonprofit consulting, anti-racist organizing, regenerative agriculture, conflict transformation, and food systems work. A Black-led consulting collective, each team member combines deep expertise in liberatory organizational development with lived experience in the movements and communities we serve. We are deeply intwined with unraveling the challenges facing social justice organizations, community-based nonprofits, and mission-driven teams working for liberation.
Asha Carter (she/her) is a facilitator, liberatory strategist, yoga instructor, and Owner of Cambium Collective. Her commitment to liberation was cultivated deeply by her grandmother, a daughter of sharecroppers who was able to preserve and pass on her love for the land.
Asha began her career supporting youth led environmental justice organizing in Boston and developing state and local agricultural policy in Atlanta, Georgia. She went on to serve in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the Obama administration and worked to defend the agency against Congressional attacks. Later, during her time as the Food Justice Strategist at DC Greens, she organized with community leaders most impacted by food insecurity to build power to impact policy at the city level. Asha is the former Deputy Director of the National Black Food and Justice Alliance, and continues to support black queer and trans land stewards to build community, resources, and power together through the Black Mycelium Project. She is the former Co-Chair of the Chesapeake Foodshed Network, and sat on its Community Ownership, Empowerment & Prosperity (COEP) Action Team.
Asha has expertise in organizational development, relational organizing, and uncovering where liberatory systems analysis meets praxis. She is an alumna of Wellesley College, where she earned her B.A. in Peace and Justice Studies with a concentration in Urban Development and Sustainability.
Beth Schermerhorn (they/them) is a white, nonbinary queer, and chronically ill facilitator, educator, strategist, and coach.
Beth brings over 15 years of experience in and alongside organizations from grassroots organizers to federal agencies working on change and transformation. They have a heartful and passionate approach to their work and is a deep diver who can ask a penetrating question then have you giggling. With a background in regenerative agriculture and design, they weave in lessons from nature that clarify and bring meaning to complex situations. As a Southern queer organizer, Beth brings the ‘front porch’ into conversations, allowing space for stories, narratives, and sharing.
Beth does this work because they believe that liberation and healing is possible. They have found deep healing, meaning, and belonging in racial and social justice movements and longs for others to feel the healing and freedom that doing racial justice work brings over time.
Dr. Sade Anderson (she/her) is a mother, racial justice organizer, facilitator, and member of Black Dirt Farm Collective which focuses on reconnecting Black people throughout the African Diaspora back to land through ancestral ways of remembering, being, and living.
Dr. Anderson’s food justice and sovereignty work in Wards 7 & 8 of the nation’s capital culminated in her doctoral dissertation entitled Black Food Matters: Surviving Anti-Blackness and Food Insecurity in Washington, D.C.
Sade has ample experience building connections and relationships across multiple identities through gardening, cooking, political education, strategic design/planning, as well as facilitation & training.
Jonathan McRay (he/him) is a farmer, facilitator, and writer in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. He is passionate about land care, healthy culture and community, and the renewable use of
energy, from sunlight to calories to conflict!
He grew up in Central Appalachia and worked overseas before completing an MA in Conflict Transformation and Restorative Justice, during which time he helped found, garden, and mediate for an urban farm, education center, and supportive
home. Jonathan regularly teaches classes and workshops on cultural ecology and restorative justice and is a member of the Speakers Collective of Soul Fire Farm, where he’s co-facilitated Uprooting Racism in the Food System trainings.
Through the Cambium Collective, he consults with and facilitates groups and
organizations to transform conflict, understand power and oppression, and shape liberating visions and decisions. Jonathan grows beautiful and useful plants
with Silver Run Forest Farm, a riparian nursery and folk school rooted in love and
living soil, committed to remediating the toxins that pollute our souls, society, and
soil, from chemical leaching to white supremacy.
His writing appears in ACRES USA, Adelaide Literary Magazine, and Geez Magazine.
Jonathan is also learning to give up erosive perfectionism in favor of joyful growth.