bluelight academy of the liberatory arts is a versatile learning community bringing people together to catalyze a shift towards a more compassionate and creative society. bluelight academy was created by Spring Up in 2020 and hosts classes and retreats created and facilitated by Spring Up collective members in spring, summer, and fall terms available to the public and to private cohorts.
The Spring Up Collective
Spring Up is a collective of care workers, transformative justice practitioners, liberatory educators, and coaches practicing and teaching the liberatory arts here at bluelight academy. We cultivate a culture of consent and liberty for all through storytelling and popular education. Sign up for our free Resilience & Revitalization (R&R) class, or join our upcoming 6 week courses and daylong retreats. If you are looking for a lower cost way to support this work and receive access to resources and coaching consider joining our patreon community. You can also get updates about our collective and projects on instagram by following @timetospringup.
About Our Pedagogy, Approach & Values
bluelight academy of the liberatory arts is a meditation on liberation designed to center the freedom of everyone involved: from students, to curriculum designers, to teaching artists and coaches. There are no requirements in any of our courses because your journey of unlearning and evolving is dependent on your choice to embrace it at the pace that aligns with your capacity and commitment. These courses are Spring Up's ode to liberty and consent, each one encompasses a collective vision and song that we invite you to join us in.
We believe in the power of the liberatory arts, and use storytelling and dialogue to facilitate trauma-informed personal and collective transformation. We view education as a mutual process- everyone has wisdom to share and something to learn. We honor this through the methodologies we use to design, develop, evaluate, and adapt. We use human centered design to generate our courses, emergent strategy to respond organically to the needs of our learning community, and participatory action research to lift up the wisdom of all participants in evaluating and collectively designing the future we desire.
Want to learn more? Enroll in our free class below where you'll get access to all of our free webinars: Consent, Accountability + Transformation; Theory of Change, Care Labor, and Coops: Nonbinary Strategies in Capitalism.
Join us for our free webinar in May!
Register to get access to the live webinar on May 16 in addition to a captioned recording.
Summer 2025 Daylong Retreats
Daylong retreats are the perfect way to devote space and time to your learning and growth. All retreats come with a 1:1 coaching session with a Spring Up consultant as well as access to retreat materials on our bluelight academy platform.
All retreats are from 8:30am-2:30pm PDT / 9:30am-3:30pm MDT / 11:30am-5:30pm EDT.
Friday 5/23: Liberatory Facilitation
Friday 6/20: Practicing Cooperation
Friday 7/25: Solidarity Strategies
Friday 8/8: Harm Systems Design
Summer 2025 Six-Week Unlearning Through Teaching Cohort
Registration for this cohort closes on May 16, 2025! The course will run from June 1 through July 27, 2025.
This summer, we are offering one of our signature six-week courses, Unlearning Through Teaching: Practicing Liberatory Education.
Join us if you are interested in embodying liberatory teaching and learning strategies in a cohort with the support of Spring Up coaches!
Summer 2025 Webinars
This summer, we're offering 6 webinars, focused on the following topics:
5/16/25: Collective Governance (FREE) | 5/30/25: Consensus + Conflict | 6/27/25: Meeting the Moment: Adaptive Organizational Strategy | 7/4/25: Accountability and Shifting Relations to the Land | 7/18/25 Race + Liberation Psychology | 8/15/25 Equitable Workload Distribution and Feminized Labor
All webinars happen from 5-6:30pm EST/4-5:30pm CST/3-4:30pm MST/2-3:30pm PST. A captioned recording of each webinar is made available via our bluelight academy platform for registrants who are unable to attend webinars live or registrants who would like to refer back to webinar content. All past webinar recordings are available at the bottom of our homepage!
Get the most out of this summer when you sign up for a bundle!
What will you do to invest in your personal development and support system this summer?
Will bluelight academy be part of making space for you to commit to your own unlearning and healing?
The bundles below offer packages of retreats, webinars, and self-paced courses at a discounted price. Take advantage of curated offerings that complement one another!
In the spirit of popular education, Spring Up is committed to offering scholarship support to as many students as we can.
We offer our daylong retreats, webinars, and six-week courses on a sliding scale to encourage our community to engage in wealth redistribution and resource-sharing.
Our scholarship form is designed to prompt reflection and offer more context on our pricing structure, and also to give students an opportunity to request what they need from us.
Fill out this form to request scholarship assistance
Self-Guided Classes
Pre-Recorded 90 Minute Webinars
Pre-Recorded Webinars that you can access at any time. All are captioned and include links to any resources that were shared live in the space.
Want private trainings, coaching, or webinars for your organization or community?
Fill out this interest form to collaborate with us
All artwork and illustrations featured on the platform were created by Zoë Rayor, and graphic design was done by shaïna m. caceres-doliny.