Meet Our Founder: Rachel Wyley
Founder & Principal, Culture Kinesis
Cultural Strategy | Organizational Transformation | Leadership Development
Culture Kinesis helps organizations build the cultural foundation required for sustainable DEI, leadership alignment, and organizational change. At the center of this work is founder Rachel Wyley. She is a cultural strategist, conflict resolution expert, and facilitator whose methodology integrates ancestral wisdom, creative practice, and deep relational accountability.
Discover All of Culture Kinesis' Offerings
The Culture Kinesis Methodology
The Culture Kinesis methodology integrates:
Cultural strategy and organizational analysis
Conflict resolution and facilitation
Leadership development
Integrative and creative healing practices
Rachel has a unique ability to create intentional containers where individuals and teams engage tension productively, take accountability, and generate their own solutions.
She reframes conflictas a site of coherence and growth, and a catalyst for trust, alignment, and collective transformation when met with skill and care.
Who Rachel Is
Rachel Wyley is a cultural strategist and organizational transformation facilitator with deep experience across various sectors, including education, nonprofit leadership, fundraising, and executive facilitation. Her work bridges rigorous organizational analysis with the creative and relational practices required for lasting individual and institutional change.
Rachel is known for her ability to:
Surface unspoken cultural dynamics
Facilitate conflict with clarity and care
Help leaders build cultures capable of navigating complexity and change
“True transformation begins long before policy or strategy; it begins with culture.”
Rachel’s Story & Professional Journey
Rachel began her career as an educator in East Oakland, where she developed a lifelong commitment to community, trust-building, and collective accountability. She has held roles ranging from entry-level staff to Executive Director across nonprofit and education-based organizations.
As a Black woman navigating leadership within well-intentioned institutions, Rachel repeatedly encountered the same limitation: organizations that named inclusion as a value but lacked the relational infrastructure and cultural foundation required for those efforts to succeed.
She concluded her nonprofit career as an Executive Director, an experience that sharpened her understanding of systems, power, institutional inheritance, and the limits of reform without cultural reckoning.
“Equity cannot take root in cultures that have yet to be examined, healed, and reimagined.”
"Diversity enhances conversations. The most rewarding experience comes from a truly diverse mix of people across various ages, artistic backgrounds, and races. Rachel recognized and clearly expressed this essential quality, a valuable insight that often requires an outside viewpoint."
— Culture Kinesis Client
Why Rachel Founded Culture Kinesis
Rachel founded Culture Kinesis in 2021 to address a critical gap in organizational change work.
Culture Kinesis is not a reaction to a moment, it is an invitation into cultural reimagination. It is an approach that focuses on the foundational and preparatory elements of cultural transformation, offering programs that function as critical leadership development, creative organizational strategy, and prerequisites to effective DEI.
Culture Kinesis helps organizations:
Build cultures capable of navigating conflict and complexity
Develop relational trust and accountability
Interrupt inherited patterns of harm
Create the conditions for sustainable equity and alignment
Learn How Culture Kinesis Supports Organizations
Fellowships & Professional Affiliations
Alumna, Women of Color LeadStrong Fellowship, The LeaderSpring Center*
Co-Facilitator, LeadStrong African-American Women’s Fellowship, The LeaderSpring Center (2023–Present)
InAccord Certified Mediator and Arbitrator (2022–Present)
The LeaderSpring Center is one of four pioneering leadership development programs in the U.S., as nationally recognized by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy.
Speaking & Facilitation Experience
Rachel is a sought-after speaker known for her ability to shift the emotional and relational field of a room and to catalyze new ways of thinking for audiences.
Selected Speaking Engagements
Learning For Action Equity Learning Lab – Telling the Story of Equity Work (2022)
Candid Webinar – Establish an Organizational Culture That Supports Your DEI Initiatives (2022)
PropelNext Alumni Speaking & Learning Series (2023)
Equity Odyssey – Inspiration from the Field with adrienne maree brown, in partnership with Learning for Action and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (2023)
Atascadero Chamber of Commerce – Women of Influence Luncheon (2023, 2024 – Keynote speaker)
Liberation Labs Virtual Panel– We Can't Afford to Wait: How to Create Workplaces That Uplift Black Women (2024)
Liberation Labs Virtual Panel – How to Continue Building Spaces for Psych Safety, Solidarity, and Self-Advocacy (2025)
Candid Virtual Panel – Nonprofit leaders speak on people-centered philanthropy (2025)
Western Association of Chamber Executives Conference Annual Conference – IGNITE Your Mind, Chamber & Soul (2026)
Audience Reflections
“Rachel brought everyone in the room onto the same plane and then settled us there together.”
“Her exceptional crowd-facilitation skills are truly amazing. She excels at entering a room and discussing complex topics with ease.”
“She brings inspiration to the space. She doesn’t just ask questions to make aspirational points. [Rachel]provides real practical skills and knowledge."
"Diversity enhances conversations. The most rewarding experience comes from a truly diverse mix of people across various ages, artistic backgrounds, and races. Rachel recognized and clearly expressed this essential quality, a valuable insight that often requires an outside viewpoint."
Artist as Strategist
Rachel is also an artist: a vocalist, poet-songwriter, and essayist. She understands art to be the solution to racial inequity, not simply its mirror and megaphone
Her facilitation draws from the African musical tradition of call-and-response, intentionally disrupting traditional power dynamics between expert and audience. Participants are required to bring an emotional presence and to practice accountability into the spaces she facilitates.
Both Rachel’s art and consulting practice are deliberately anti-performance, rooted in participation, reciprocity, and truth.
“Creativity is not an accessory to equity. It is the pathway.”