Meet The Co-Founders

Katie Robinson (any pronouns) is a writer, facilitator, scholar, and interdisciplinary artist devoted to exploring what is present and possible outside of the white supremacist colonial imagination. They are the co-founder of Living Systems Consulting, where they bring over eight years of experience designing and facilitating equity-centered learning experiences, organizational development programs, and transformative curricula for institutions, collectives, and movements.

Katie comes from a lineage of innovators who believed that relational strength and creativity are ultimately what unlock human potential. Their grandfather, Larry Wilson, in many ways a rebel against corporate conformity, founded the Pecos River Learning Center to help Fortune 500 companies not just perform better, but genuinely reinvent themselves: their cultures, their leadership, and their capacity to meet a shifting world. Their father George, and their mother Susie, along with a constellation of aunts and uncles, all poured themselves into the Pecos River mission, running programs built on the conviction that courage, authentic relationship, and the willingness to be transformed are the engines of real change. George carried that spirit into his own globally recognized work as a speaker and trainer, challenging organizations across 34 countries to reckon honestly with unconscious bias and build more equitable workplaces. 

Katie grew up immersed in a world shaped by a deep belief in human possibility, and the necessity of collective striving. They carry that inheritance forward, reorienting it through decolonial, abolitionist, and healing justice frameworks. Where Pecos River asked corporations to grow beyond fear, and George asked companies to reckon with bias, Katie asks communities, institutions, and movements to recognize and grow beyond the systems that produce harm in the first place. Katie does this work carrying their mom, dad, and grandfather - all now ancestors - close.

Katie holds an MA and a newly completed PhD from Pacifica Graduate Institute, where their dissertation, Toward a New Metaphysics of Political Struggle, examined how Minneapolis-based abolitionists enact decolonial, relational worlds through creative anti-carceral practice. Their essay "Here's How I Let Them Come Close" appears in A Darker Wilderness: Black Nature Writing from Soil to Stars (Milkweed, 2023).

You can learn more about Katie at katie-robinson.com.

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Leah Garza (she/her) is a Los Angeles–based scholar, mystic, and facilitator whose work explores the intersections of decoloniality, ontology, posthumanism, and ecological futures. As the founder of Crystals of Altamira and creator of the year-long Living Systems curriculum, she has guided nearly 300 students across three cohorts to collectively wonder: if extinction is inevitable, what else is possible?

That same question now animates Living Systems Consulting, which she co-founded with Katie to bring this work directly into organizations ready to ask it. Leah brings nearly two decades of experience in education as a teacher and organizer, alongside extensive work in staff development, HR, curriculum design, and facilitation — grounding her theoretical work in the lived, practical realities of how institutions actually function, and where they fail the people inside them.

Her teaching and research ask how decolonial pedagogies can cultivate public spaces of intellectual intimacy and nurture relational ways of being, particularly for those living "above the Abyssal line." Leah brings both rigor and whimsy to her practice.

She holds a  PhD from  Pacifica Graduate Institute in the Community, Liberation, Indigenous, and Eco Psychologies program. Her dissertation "No one is superfluous in a Living System; Relational pedagogies in praxis", explores decolonial pedagogies as a means for transforming reality. She has prior degrees including an M.A. in Depth Psychology (CLIE), an M.Ed and teaching credential from UCLA, and a B.A. in Linguistics from Northeastern University. Across all her work, Leah's approach is guided by curiosity, resonance, and the conviction that transformation can be not only possible but joyful.

You can learn more about Leah at crystalsofaltamira.com