Creating new worlds requires writing radical new narratives.
I help create them.
My work as a creative leader, coach, and consultant weaves together liberatory leadership, storytelling, and inclusive systems design. I work with individuals, teams, and organizations ready to build something that holds people rather than extracts from them.
How we build our communities & organizations must center belonging. This begins with the stories we tell.
auburn rutledge (she/they) is a creative people leader, program designer, and coach whose work weaves together frameworks of liberatory leadership, storytelling, and inclusive systems design. With more than twelve years of experience building high-performing teams and designing human-centered operational frameworks, she pairs deep strategic expertise with the ongoing study of imagination, emergent strategy, and culture change.
auburn's practice centers on bringing rigorous systems thinking and a worldbuilding orientation to every engagement, whether that's a one-on-one coaching relationship or an organizational transformation effort.
As a queer, Black, mixed, and AuDHD person, she brings perspectives from the margin that consistently generate new ways of solving old problems. This is the foundation of her work.
AREAS OF PRACTICE
• Liberatory leadership design
• Emergent strategy & worldbuilding
• Inclusive systems & spacemaking
• Identity & narrative reclamation
• Organizational culture change
• Creativity as survival technology
FORMATIONS
• MA Creative Leadership, Minneapolis College of Art & Design (2025)
• ICF Level II Coach Training, Lumia (Aug 2026)
• Future Front, Executive Board Secretary (2026-)
• MS Creativity & Change, SUNY Buffalo (2026-)
• BFA Film & Television, NYU Tisch
The way I work matters as much as what we build.
Every engagement is rooted in the same set of commitments. They are the operating principles I hold myself to in every room where I lead, facilitate, or participate.
I believe in power-with versus power-over. I believe the most sustainable systems are the ones that don't require anyone to disappear themselves to participate.
I believe creativity is survival technology and worldbuilding, and the core method of change—whether at an individual, community, organizational, or systemic level.
LIBERATORY LEADERSHIP
Leadership as shared agency and collective ownership. Power-with, not power-over.
RADICAL INFRASTRUCTURE
Relationships are infrastructure. Systems built with care hold people rather than extract from them.
EMERGENT STRATEGY
Worldbuilding and creative systems thinking as real tools for organizational and personal change.
WHOLENESS
No success that requires fragmentation. Belonging must be the foundation, inclusion must be woven into every framework.
Three ways into the work.
I
Individual & group coaching
For people navigating identity, leadership, transition, and the work of building a life that is honest, sustainable, and fully your own. Grounded in empathy, truth-telling, and narrative design.
II
Consulting & strategy
For organizations ready to build (or rebuild) programs, operations, and people systems from a different set of values. My work with teams and organizations is centered in emergent strategy, radical infrastructure, and systems designed for belonging.
HOW WE CAN BEGIN
III
Facilitation & workshops
For groups ready to move through something together. This includes leadership development, storytelling, design thinking, creative problem-solving. I design sessions centered in being real and honest in our shared container, and creating that container to last beyond our engagement.