By design, the Co-Op is intergenerational and invites participants to see what happens when they are matched with a perfect stranger to coach them for six sessions. Each human being whom we encounter as peer coach holds a different space through their being, skills, insight and experience. And also, each new human creates an opportunity  - a new canvas - on which we discover more about ourselves, our biases, our self-judgments, our limiting beliefs. We come to coaching with an intellectual understanding of the project; that is we know that it is for our own self discovery, to tap our own wisdom and not a mentoring or similar relationship in which wisdom and answers are gifted upon us. The gift of peer coaching is in the magic of two humans partnering in co-creating a space to take a closer look and tap one's own wisdom.
 
In this interview, Co-Op and Advisory Board Member Erika Gabriela Lopez Arteaga interviews Co-Op member Lauren Marx about her experience being peer-coached by someone significantly younger. Lauren also shares insights on what she learned about herself in the process and how she would prepare for future rounds of reciprocal peer coaching through the Conspiring Women Peer Coaching Co-Op.

View the interview here: 

Listen to the interview here:

About Lauren Marx
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Lauren Marx is a highly accomplished mediator, facilitator, coach, ombuds, and trainer with 8+ years of experience empowering individuals, teams, and organizations with the skills and support needed to embrace conflict as an opportunity for growth. She believes that when harnessed and managed, it can become a powerful tool for nurturing an inclusive workplace that encourages creative ideas, active and inspired engagement, and open and respectful communication. Over the past several years, her work has focused on navigating equity and belonging, psychological safety, microaggressions and “grey” behavior, change, and virtual workplaces.  

Colleagues and clients describe Lauren as a compassionate, authentic, energetic, and trusted partner who is committed to their success and always coming up with new, creative options.  

Lauren enjoys adventure, traveling and learning about different cultures and meeting new people. On the weekends, you can frequently find her biking, hiking, and camping with her family (including her dog, Emily), exploring all that the Pacific Northwest has to offer. Lauren is an avid fan of puzzles and games especially the daily NY Times Crossword, Spelling Bee, and Sudoku.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-marx-582b303b/

Lauren Marx
Lauren Marx Consulting, LLC (website coming soon) 
​https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-marx-582b303b/

​bout Erika Gabriela López Arteaga
 
Erika is passionate about social justice and the policies and institutions set in place to guarantee social rights. She has worked in the international development field, government institutions, civil society and non-for-profit organizations, and also as a university lecturer and language teacher. She is interested in bridging policy-making, academic and theoretical knowledge and practice.
 
Erika is an Internationalist, with a master's degree in Development Studies with a minor in Human and Social Development, and a post-graduate diploma in Gender and Public Policies. In August 2021, she is starting a master's program in International Social Welfare and Health Policy in Oslo Metropolitan University. 

Would you like to practice your interviewing skills and meet other Conspiring Women or be interviewed about your experience in the Co-Op? Contact us and we'll match you up!

We're thrilled to share that we've awarded the Conspiring Women Impact Award to Natalia Machuca! Through our programs, women develop deep peer coaching converstations and expand there networks.  Members of Conspiring Women were invited to nominate others in the network for the Impact Award.

Here's the award description:  So many of you are out there making a difference in the world, and yet we know that a lot of this work goes unrecognized. Through Conspire's programs, you've likely met someone whose work in the world is important and inspiring to you. This is your chance to elevate their work and their impact among members of our community and beyond.

Our awardee, Natalia, was nominated by her peer coach through the Conspiring Women Peer Coaching Co-Op, Colleen Kineen. Here's what Colleen wrote in  her nomination:

"When you are in Natalia's presence, you immediately sense the depth and power of her soul. To me, she epitomizes what it means to be a strong female leader. Authentic, soulful, adept at holding space and developing vision that motivates those around her and spurs them to action. Natalia innately serves as a lighthouse for those around her, using her own light to guide others to step into their full potential from a place of love and possibility. I believe that Natalia is deserving of the Impact Award (or a new award that I'd call the Soulful Leader award) for her courageous strength in showing up in her full light and in so doing, enabling others to do the same. This to me is the strength of a true leader but is a model of leadership that isn't often overtly recognized or valued. Keep your eyes on Natalia, she's just getting started and is sure to continue to create the most powerful of waves through her life's work and the ways she continually inspires others."

Thank you, Colleen, for this beautiful nomination.  In Nataila's honor, we've planted trees via TreeSisters to support women and indigenous led reforestation initiatives in critical forests.  We invite you to honor Natalia by contributing to this reforestation initiative as well.

We hope you'll take a few minutes to learn more about Natalia's inspirational work in public health - a field I know we all deeply appreciate more than ever.

Natalia Machuca

Natalia Machuca has 15 years of experience in public health, including 13 years in federal government service at the National Institutes of Health and the U.S Agency for International Development (USAID). Ms. Machuca joined USAID in 2010 as an Infectious Disease Advisor in the Bureau for Latin America and the Caribbean supporting Malaria, Tuberculosis, Emerging Pandemic Threats, and Neglected Tropical Diseases in the Latin American and Caribbean region.  While in that role, she also worked on the response to Haiti’s Cholera outbreak and the regional response to Zika. In 2016, Ms. Machuca joined the Bureau for Global Health's Neglected Tropical Diseases Division, first as a Senior Operations Officer and later became the Deputy Division Chief.  Ms. Machuca has supported various Bureau for Global Health efforts, including the recent COVID-19 commodity shipments to India and Brazil.  Ms. Machuca recently joined the U.S. President Malaria Initiative as the USAID's Malaria Division's Deputy Division Chief.  

Prior to USAID, Ms. Machuca worked as an Infectious Disease Specialist at the Association of Public Health Laboratories where she supported the domestic response to the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic.  Before attending graduate school, Ms. Machuca received an Intramural Research Training Award to work at National Institutes of Health for two years.

Ms. Machuca is deeply committed to public service, and strives to foster a healthy work culture.  She speaks fluent Spanish, is a long-distance runner and yogi, and holds a Master’s of Science in Public Health Microbiology and Emerging Infectious Diseases from George Washington University.

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For a decade, Conspire has grounded our coaching programs for women leaders in our core commitments to 1)  nurturing collective resilience (i.e. we need each other to be resilient) so that we can  2) sustain and fully unleash the untapped potential of women in leadership towards solving the world’s most significant problems.

As we enter into our second decade, our coaching practice has evolved along with the coaching field with an even more urgent commitment to deepening our collective consciousness about what Peter Hawkins describes as the “Seven Interconnected Global Challenges: Climate emergency, Air, sea & soil degradation, Loss of biodiversity, Mono-culture & control, Increasing mental distress, Human prejudice, and Widening inequality. We understand the well-documented evidence that investing in women’s education and leadership in all of these areas is one of the key ways we will mitigate harm and create a resilient future for future generations.

So as we enter our second decade, we will be even more explicit about being a regenerative, women-centered, coaching practice and we invite all of our stakeholders to hold us to this commitment. A major new initiative is partnering with TreeSisters to support women-led reforestation initiatives in critical eco-systems. Each time you enroll in one of our coaching programs, we will plant a tree via TreeSisters. We invite you to top up this donation whenever you can so that Conspiring Women can stand behind the women who are regenerating the lungs and biodiversity of our planet. 

Thank you for conspiring together for a decade and here’s to new decade that will reveal our collective ability to rise to this urgent moment. Let’s grow a Conspiring Women forest!


More info on TreeSisters below:


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Why Trees, Why Now? Trees offer humanity one of the most crucial ecosystem services available to us at this phase of our evolution. Currently global warming is threatening all life on Earth. While we figure out how to reduce carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the forests of our world are drawing it down into their roots, branches, boughs and leaves. They are invaluable in helping to cool us down. To provide any viable hope for future generations, we need to replace deforestation with a reforestation revolution. We can't wait for governments to lead the way. Together, we are restoring forests in 10+ major ecosystems including those in Madagascar, India, Brazil, Kenya, and Nepal, Mozambique, West Papua and Cameroon. 

We plant trees to restore ecosystems and livelihoods whilst increasing protection against the extremes of climate change in multiple regions of the tropical forest belt. We do this in ways that recreate and restore natural forest ecosystems using indigenous species, fostering local knowledge and skills, and promoting women's participation. We strive to do it intelligently, appropriately, respectfully and successfully. 

Forests play a vital role in the hydrological cycles of our world, sequestering the atmospheric carbon dioxide that is driving climate change. When trees are removed, vibrant ecosystems are often overfarmed, eroded and rendered infertile in a cascade effect that is mirrored with social decline, grinding poverty and climate extremes. Reforestation can rapidly reverse these trends, stabilizing and nourishing the soils, restoring watersheds, revitalizing dry springs and providing good quality water to large populations living downstream. 
You can read more about our Reforestation approach and our Reforestation Partners on the homepage of our website.