About
Potency is a strategic consulting practice specializing in organizational support, crisis prevention, leadership development, and wellness coaching for organizations navigating challenges in a dynamically changing society. We assess the specific needs of a client in order to design tailor made interventions that support clients’ unique challenges and conditions. If needed, Potency pulls totogether a team with specific expertise to ensure the most effective solutions.
Meet the Team
Yalini Dream, Founding Director
Meet Yalini Dream, the visionary force behind Potency. With a background in storytelling and culture shift, Yalini seamlessly integrates an artistic lens into a consulting and coaching practice. For over 20 years, Yalini has provided guidance to organizations contending with conflict, recognizing the importance of proactive measures in preventing crises, particularly in high-pressure environments. Leveraging expertise in somatics movement and creative practices, Yalini empowers leaders to innovate and align their ethics with action, making tangible and strategic impact towards their vision. Yalini has worked with a diverse range of clients, including the Center for Constitutional Rights, National Lawyers Guild, Borealis Philanthropy, and the Transgender Law Center, among others. Yalini has expertise in supporting leaders navigate oppositional attacks and hostile conditions.
Colleen Thompson, Relationship Strategist
Colleen Thompson is a relationship strategist, program designer, and founding director of Thrive Culture. As a facilitator, she utilizes artistic and contemplative tools to engage in transformative conversations and skills-building that cultivate group synergy and ethical, healthier, organizational cultures. Colleen has excelled in community engagement at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and as a consultant for biwa-Emergent Equity in North Carolina. Colleen expertise lies in cultivating the social-emotional dexterity needed to collaborate and move through the cultural impacts of change in healthy ways. Colleen serves Potency Clients through retreat facilitation, project management, and culture shift projects
Chanté Lewis, Operations and Special Projects
Chanté Lewis is an award-winning writer, director, producer, and founding Creative Director of Trance Ending Films and The Hold On Experience. Through this work, she developed a multi-modal film companion experience that integrates evidence-based clinical approaches, breathwork, creative practice, and community to empower "co-creators" to build resilience as they move through complex experiences.
In parallel with her creative work, Chanté works on a variety of projects across media, production, public agencies, and finance to provide project management, operations, and analytical support where she manages project sequencing, stakeholder relationships, risk analysis, and process improvement. At Potency, Chanté manages logistics, communication, coordination, and implementation of project details.
Shree Baphna, Program Associate
Shree Baphna is a researcher and organiser based in New York City with a background in public health. She has worked on a variety of health equity projects including a pandemic campaign that targeted Big Pharma to increase COVID-19 vaccine access for women, girls, and gender minorities in the Global South.
Since moving to New York City in 2022, Shree has been an organiser with SALAM, a South Asian leftist political organisation. With SALAM, Shree currently co-coordinates a city-wide campaign that targets complicity of Indian conglomerates in genocide and war-profiteering. Through SALAM, she has experience with operations, strategy, and facilitation. Shree serves Potency through project research and logistics.