A first-pass internal audit of the course curriculum, conducted from the materials themselves rather than from outside reading. This page surfaces what holds up, what carries unexamined assumptions, and where targeted edits would broaden the course's reach without rewriting it. The aim is not a clean bill of health. It's an honest map of where the work still needs to be done.
A note about this audit
This was conducted by reading our own materials and naming what we could see. An outside reader — someone with lived experience the curriculum's writers do not share — would surface more. A second-pass audit with outside readers from disability communities, working-class communities, non-Western contexts, and trauma-survivor communities is itself a future work stream. This page is the starting point, not the finish line.
What holds up
Worth naming the strengths before the gaps — partly because they're real, partly because the gaps below should not be read as a verdict on the whole.
Where the materials need work
These are not failures of intent — they are blind spots that show up when you read the materials looking for them. Each finding includes specific examples, and a targeted fix that does not require a rewrite.
Finding 01 · Class assumptions
A high proportion of examples assume a professional-class context: meetings, panels, HR, boards, hourly staff "in the room to push back." Working-class participants whose conflicts happen in restaurants, on shop floors, in care homes, or in informal contexts may find themselves translating constantly to apply the material.
Specific places: "Name the harm" page — "we're about to approve a panel with no women on it." Week 07 examples — "this decision will hurt the hourly staff." Week 04 hard conversation examples — assume workplace settings.
Targeted fix: Add 1–2 non-professional scenarios per week — service work, retail, care work, neighborhood, informal organizing, family-run business. The principles are the same; the rooms should look different in the examples.
Finding 02 · Family structure
Week 09 (Peacemaking at home) uses partner / kids / parents / siblings as the standard set of relationships. Chosen family, queer family structures, multi-generational households, polyamorous families, single-parent households, sibling-as-parent dynamics, and roommates-as-family-equivalent are not explicitly named.
Specific places: Week 09 Move framings repeatedly reference "partner" or "your partner and your kids." The "assigned roles" pressure references a "family system" that reads as nuclear.
Targeted fix: In Week 09, broaden the language to "the people you live with or are closest to," and explicitly name chosen family, roommates, multigenerational households, queer family structures, and single-parent / single-adult households as included by default. Add one example per Move from a non-nuclear context.
Finding 03 · Neurotypical / verbal-introspective bias
The practices assume comfort with verbal share, sustained eye contact, four-minute silent listening, handwritten reflection, role-play, group discussion, and emotional vocabulary. Autistic participants, ADHD participants, participants with social anxiety, participants with selective mutism, and others may find the standard practices unworkable as designed.
Specific places: Week 03 four-minute listen. Week 05 four-move letter (handwritten). Week 10 appreciation round (each member receives a sentence from each other member, verbally, in front of the group).
Targeted fix: For each practice that has a single delivery mode, design 1–2 alternative modes — written instead of spoken, brief instead of extended, parallel-pair instead of full-group, structured prompts instead of open-ended share. Name these alternatives in the facilitator notes as standard options, not as accommodations.
Finding 04 · Position of relative power as the implicit reader
Many practices assume the participant has positional safety to call out harm, mediate, refuse to mediate, or set boundaries. A participant whose social or economic position is precarious — undocumented, in an abusive household, dependent on a particular job, deeply marginalized in their community — may experience the curriculum as written for someone with more cushion than they have.
Specific places: Week 07 "accept the cost" frames cost as relational and reputational; for some participants it is economic survival. Week 08 "step out" assumes the mediator has the standing to refuse; some don't. Week 06 boundaries assume the harmed person can enforce them.
Targeted fix: Add an explicit "what if the cost is more than you can afford" thread in Weeks 06, 07, and 08. Acknowledge that some participants will be in positions where the standard moves are not safe to make, and that recognizing that — not pretending it's not true — is itself peacemaking work.
Finding 05 · Cultural/geographic specificity
Several examples assume US cultural references (Braver Angels, MLK as the touchstone civil-rights figure, Bryan Stevenson on US carceral justice). The materials don't claim to be only American, but the unmarked default is American. Participants from other contexts will read the curriculum as universal when it is actually situated.
Specific places: Week 07 sources lean heavily American (Stevenson, Chenoweth's data on US movements, MLK). Week 09 family-systems references (Bowen, Gottman) are American clinical traditions.
Targeted fix: Where US-specific sources are cited, name them as such ("the US civil rights tradition"). Add 1–2 non-Western or non-American examples and figures across the course's spine — not as token additions but as parallel sources doing similar work in different contexts (e.g., Latin American liberation theology, Filipino people-power movements, Indian Dalit organizing, South African TRC beyond Tutu).
Finding 06 · Trauma assumption
The facilitator notes acknowledge that material may surface, and Weeks 05/06/07/09 are flagged as potentially heavy. But the curriculum as a whole is designed for participants whose trauma is not active. Survivors of severe ongoing trauma, people with active PTSD symptoms, and people in current crisis are likely to find the standard practices destabilizing rather than helpful.
Specific places: Week 06 "feel it" move asks participants to sit with anger, grief, fear — language that assumes the feelings can be sat with safely. Week 09 family-of-origin material can surface dissociation or flashback in some survivors.
Targeted fix: The "Who this course is for" page already names that acute crisis is a signal this isn't the moment. Strengthen the trauma-informed framing by adding (a) an explicit grounding practice option in Week 06's facilitator notes, and (b) a referral protocol — see also the planned risk-and-safety framework in the work-streams list.
Finding 07 · Whose names appear in scenarios
When example names appear, they're sparse, but they default Anglo ("Maya" is the one notable exception). Scenarios that personalize themselves with a name are more vivid; names that represent only one community make some participants feel addressed and others feel adjacent.
Specific places: The vague-vs-specific table on the "name the harm" page uses "Maya" — good. Other pages use no names at all, which avoids the problem by also avoiding the vividness.
Targeted fix: Add example names to scenarios across the curriculum, drawn from a deliberately diverse set of cultural-linguistic origins. Build a small "names list" the curriculum draws from consistently — not as token diversity but as reflection of who the room actually contains.
Finding 08 · Single-facilitator gender
Lindsey runs the early cohorts and is referenced throughout as "she." The pattern is natural for the pilot but becomes a residue when materials are read by future facilitators of any gender. A reader from outside might absorb "the facilitator is female" as part of the design.
Specific places: Course concept doc, facilitator notes across multiple weeks, FAQ. References to "Lindsey" and "she" intermix freely with the more abstract "facilitator."
Targeted fix: Distinguish two registers: (a) when discussing the current pilot, name Lindsey directly. (b) when describing the role in general, use "the facilitator" or "they." Future facilitator-training materials should not use gendered pronouns for the role.
If we had to choose
All eight findings are worth addressing. Some are more urgent than others. In order of leverage — the ones that change the most for the smallest revision — these are the three to do first.
Single most concentrated set of nuclear-family assumptions in the curriculum, in a week that's already emotionally weighty. A small set of edits to use "the people you live with" and to name chosen family / multigenerational / queer / single-adult households explicitly does most of the work.
The four-minute listen, the four-move letter, and the appreciation round are the three highest-cost practices for participants who don't engage well in the standard mode. Designing one alternative mode per practice (written instead of spoken; structured pairs instead of full-group; brief instead of extended) is high-leverage and protects accessibility before the pilot scales.
Three brief callouts — not full rewrites — that name when the standard moves are not safe to make, and what the work is in that case. Protects participants whose positional safety is lower than the implicit reader's.
What this audit doesn't capture
This audit was done from inside the materials. A second-pass audit with outside readers would almost certainly find things we did not.
Specifically: readers from disability communities (especially blind, deaf, and physically disabled participants) would name accessibility gaps we can't see. Readers from working-class organizing traditions would name where our examples assume cushion. Readers from non-US contexts would name where our framings carry cultural assumptions. Survivors of severe trauma would name where the curriculum's "sit with it" instinct is destabilizing rather than helpful. Readers who hold marginalized religious identities (Muslim, Jewish, Indigenous, Bahá'í, Sikh) may notice where their traditions are summarized in ways that flatten the lived experience of belonging to them.
Commissioning that second pass — with paid time for the readers, not as a favor — is the right next step. It belongs alongside the other work streams in the rollout plan.