Get to know EKG
Ellery Graves
Certified Professional Coach (CPC), Global Career Development Facilitator (GCDF)
Ellery Graves is a Healing-Centered Coach (ICF Certified thru Blooming Willow Life Coaching Institute), and trainer supporting people working toward justice, healing, and collective liberation. Her work creates space to reconnect with what matters most, allowing each person’s unique strengths and inner power to guide them toward meaningful action in their lives and communities.
Over the last decade, Ellery’s approach has been shaped by her work at Oakland Private Industry Council and other Oakland-based community organizations, where she supported job seekers impacted by the justice system and community violence in securing livable-wage employment or career training, and stable housing. Centering purpose, agency, and dignity, she witnessed how transformation happens when people are supported not just in meeting goals, but in reconnecting to their power and vision for their lives. These relationships, along with her own lived experience and continued healing process continue to ground her coaching and training today.
Ellery now brings this healing-centered, justice-rooted approach to both individuals and organizations. She is the founder of Culture Shifters, a healing-centered coaching practice for anti-racist organizers, social service workers, activists, and community members confronting the patterns that hold us back from the bold action anti-racism requires.
Through 1-on-1 coaching and her monthly Amplifying Impact workshop series, she supports people committed to racial justice in untangling white supremacy culture from their bones and bodies, and deepening how they show up in alignment with their values. She also partners with community-based organizations to strengthen relationships, clarify values, and navigate the real challenges of living those values in practice.
Through her collaboration with Kevin Grant under EKG Trainings & Consulting, their offerings focus on strengthening relationships within teams, centering the wisdom of lived experience, and fostering curiosity and courageous conversations. Together, they create spaces that emphasize what’s strong with us—rather than what’s wrong with us—so we can more authentically and powerfully serve our communities. She has co-facilitated staff development trainings with local nonprofits and government entities including the City of Oakland Department of Violence Prevention, La Familia, Westcoast Children's Clinic, Options Recovery Services, IHART of the City of Vallejo, A Better Way, Inc., Lincoln Families, Alameda County, and more.
Ellery believes healing starts (and continues) with strengthening the vitality of our relationship to our unique essence, our wins big and small, our connection to our lineage, what we hold sacred to us, and what we want to pass on to future generations. Ellery’s philosophies are based in her Buddhist practice of turning our karma into our mission.
If she’s not with her partner or family, you can find her sitting by the water of the Bay, playing drums with her band, rollerblading, writing, dancing, or enjoying live music with those she loves.
Kevin Grant
City of Oakland, Dept. of Violence Prevention, Lead Trainer, System Partners Liaison, Violence Interrupter, & Motivational Speaker
Kevin Grant is a nationally renowned expert in street outreach, violence mediation, prisoner re-entry, and employment programs aimed at helping youth and young adults find alternatives to violence and crime. He has thirty years of experience working with at-risk youth and the formerly incarcerated in the San Francisco Bay Area and has literally touched thousands of lives.
Over the past thirty years, Kevin provides classes as a consultant via Kevin Grant Consulting, to juvenile’s offenders confined at the Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center, youth at Camp Sweeny (a juvenile detention camp) and to many high control juvenile probationers in Alameda County. He has also provided similar services for the California State Parole Office.
Kevin is the Violence Prevention Systems Partner Coordinator and Primary Trainer for the City of Oakland, California since 2006. He leads skilled Violence Interrupter teams who are made up of members of the community. The V.I. teams attempt to stop violence before it happens. The teams walk the streets of Oakland's neighborhoods plagued by crime. Trusted in the community, the street teams listen and assess issues, mediate potentially violent situations and connect individuals to needed resources. This community approach has resulted in fewer incidents of assault and battery and other violent crimes.
Recognized as a national expert, Kevin also provides workshops, consultation and trainings for law enforcement agencies, community service providers and school districts at local, state and federal levels. Workshop topics include: how to work with network involved youth; best practices in implementing a street violence interruption program; job training and employment for hard to serve youth and young adults among many others.
Kevin is the winner of the 2013 California Wellness Peace Prize, a prestigious honor in the field of violence prevention. He also was honored as a Hometown Hero by Comcast and the Bay Area News Group in 2010 and received the Oakland Citizen Humanitarian Award in 2009. Kevin is a sought after motivational speaker, trainer and conference panelist. Despite these wider opportunities to share what he has learned over the years and manage citywide projects, he still rarely turns away individuals or “loved ones” seeking out his help. For Kevin, saving youth from the streets is not just a career, it is a calling.
ABC 7 Original: Kevin.
Meet Kevin: A man on a mission to stop gun violence in Oakland
Speaking to Pastors of Oakland Ceasefire Meeting 2013
Pastors of Oakland Ceasefire Meeting - January 2013 - Kevin Grant
In the News
https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/oakland-ex-criminal-aims-to-broker-peace-4145606.php
https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/reformed-oakland-criminal-honored-for-good-work/1936484/
https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2012/11/22/kevin-grant-is-a-recipient-of-the-california-peace-prize/
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