Training for Change (TFC) Associates, is a training and consulting firm founded in 1982 and based in Ithaca, New York. Their work has been in corporate and in not-for-profit environments, with unions, educational institutions, federal, state and local government organizations, and grassroots community organizations and initiatives for social justice and positive change. Kirby Edmonds and Laura Branca were the principal consultants and managing partners of TFC until Kirby's untimely passing in 2020. Their work is continued by Laura and other long-time colleagues.
TFC has designed training workshops, racial healing dialogue processes, written manuals, and provided consulting services for a wide variety of organizations and networks such as UNICEF, Corning, Inc., Pennsylvania Department of Health, National Skill Standards Board, the National Rural Development Partnership, Supreme Court of Ohio, AFLCIO, union executives in the manufacturing sector, a migrant workers’ alliance in New York state, and multicultural leadership projects for youth.
Laura leads customized workshops in many topic areas such as diversity, equity and inclusion, cultural competence and human rights education, communication skills, group facilitation skills, team-building, visioning, coaching, collaborative problem-solving and building consensus. TFC provides consulting services for network and coalition building, organizational change and development, planning, leadership development, building equitable and inclusive organizations, and recruiting and retaining diversity in the workplace.
Laura is a co-founder, Senior Fellow and the Project Director of the Dorothy Cotton Institute. She is a trained community mediator with over 37 years’ experience helping people address and resolve interpersonal, multi-party, inter-organizational and community conflicts and has taught courses on conflict management and cooperative conflict resolution. Laura is a skilled facilitator of discussion and intergroup dialogue centering social identity and intersecting forms of exclusion and oppression.