Work with me · For your people
For your people
An organization is an ecosystem. Every element shifts the health of the whole — so the gains do not add up. They compound.
In short
- Who it's for — companies, schools, foundations and public agencies whose people are carrying more than the structure was built to hold.
- Two ways in — consulting, where we work on the system itself; and training, where we work with the people inside it. Most engagements use both.
- Format — in person and virtual, shaped to your calendar rather than a fixed curriculum.
- How it starts — a conversation. Scope and investment are set once I understand what you are actually carrying.
The argument
Two nurses, identically capable
Take two emergency nurses. Same training, same competence, same years on the floor. One of them keeps a compassion practice and a creative life, holds a hair trigger for being amazed, and follows her purpose when it moves. The other does none of that.
Ask where each of them is in ten years. One is still there and still good. The other has gone, or has stayed and hollowed.
That is designing in collapse somewhere — or designing in really substandard care.
This is not a conversation about whether people feel good at work. It is a conversation about whether the capability you already paid for is still there in five years.
Saying it without blame
The useful move is not to tell people they are doing it wrong. There is no presumption of laziness, and none of a lack of intelligence. What you are saying is that the system you are all working inside is not sustainable enough — that it is not working.
And the best shortcut, that everybody gets instantly, is the word bandwidth.
What an employer actually controls
It can be the physical working conditions. It can be the tenor of a place, and its emotional and intellectual safety. It can be what the break room feels like. It can be whether the bathrooms are nice to go into.
You are either sanctuary, or you are being not-sanctuary, for the people around you. … We are the ecosystem that they are living in.
Consulting
Designing the system so it can hold people
You bring me in to think structurally about what is resilient here and what is not.
It starts with you. Then with the relationship between the people at the top, because that is a structure too, and everything downstream inherits it. Then the ordinary machinery: how you organize things. How you hire. How you design the rooms people walk into, so that the particular thing you are offering them arrives in the most frictionless, invitational way you can make it. How you support your staff. What the nature of your communications is. Where the blind spots are.
A client once put it more briefly than I ever have. She said: so consulting is design work. It is. And it is multifaceted.
Sometimes resilience shows up as the strength you need to believe you have done all you can to put things in place for someone else to succeed — and then stepping aside and letting it go into their hands, no matter how afraid you are to let go of your life’s work.
Then later stepping back in, only when asked, with boundaries in place, to listen and help identify the best parts of an organization to save, and move those parts to another organization so that they may continue way into the future.
Barb Coffman · Retired Director, Montana Environmental Training Center · MSU-Northern
Why both
The levels feed each other
In one senior living community I worked at three levels inside a single engagement. With the whole staff — everyone who touched people, systems or structure — so that one shared language for well-being existed across the building, along with how to say a true thing without triggering anyone, and how to tell what is yours to carry from what is not.
With the residents, how to own and craft vibrant well-being without vibrant physical well-being: expression, gratitude, memory, creativity, connection, belonging.
And with the leadership team — individually, on how each of them fed their own well-being through time and where they were fragile; structurally, on where the organization was robust through time, and where fragility sat because of an old decision, or because nobody had looked, or because it was simply what tradition said.
Any one of those alone would have made a difference. Run together, they fed each other. Staff who are steadier and better nourished are easier to be with, easier to keep, and burn out less. Residents who feel they have agency and belong ask less of the staff, which lightens their work, which makes the caring easier again — and residents discover they are far more responsible than they knew for their own quality of life, and that adding to someone else’s adds back to their own. Leadership stops treating well-being as a program and starts seeing it in who they hire and what they hire for, in how plainly they communicate, in how a person is treated from their first day to their last.
I could have raised the water in any one of these and something would have improved. Raise all three at once and the effect is not added. It is cumulative, and it is astonishing.
Training
Giving people the tools, and the time to feel them work
Sometimes what you need is smaller and more specific. Someone calls and says: come in for an hour, as part of our employee development program. Then I come and do a training, and we choose together which one meets the most real need.
Training can stand on its own, or sit inside the consulting work. Either way it is where the tools get into people's hands — not as theory, but as practices they use in the room and take back to a Tuesday. They keep them. Two years after a single afternoon, people are still using the same picture to describe their own week.
There is also something that happens simply because it is not you saying it. A leader can say a true thing a dozen times and watch it land differently the once it comes from another voice in the room.
The corporate training sheet — who I am, the kinds of things I work on, and how to reach me. Two pages, made to be forwarded to whoever else needs to see it.
The work I’ve done with you has given me a lens — literally a rose-colored glass through which to see people. To have empathy in the right spaces, to be a boundary in the right spaces, to support in the right spaces. I have language to help them, and to push them forward.
Kama Werner · Co-Founder, State of Play
And from someone the training happened to, rather than the person who booked it:
I wasn’t sure what to expect, but what followed was far more impactful than I could have imagined. … I now have tools I can use to identify when I am struggling and “my lake is low”. I have language I can use to share with my peers to communicate my needs.
This was a valuable experience I will reflect on all school year, and likely for the rest of my life.
Katherine Hagen · State of Play
Where the job is a vocation and the need is bottomless, this work often begins somewhere unexpected: that caring for themselves is not separate from caring for their careers. People give past their own capacity for the best reasons, and the culture calls it dedication. That is a system problem wearing a personal face.
What clients are saying
Lorca is remarkable in her ability to work with educators to create a dynamic where they feel safe working with each other and within themselves. Because teachers can often give themselves to the point where they leave their profession, she trained our staffs in understanding how caring for themselves is caring for their careers.
Gennifre Hartman · Partnership Program Manager, Where There Be Dragons · Founder, The Traveling School
I was beyond burnt out after almost thirty years in the water and wastewater industry, and the two other employees were young and inexperienced. … It helped us reduce stress by learning it was okay and safe to talk about our stresses within our office. It helped us to be more compassionate with one another, and helped us to become better leaders by setting examples for others.
Barb Coffman · Retired Director, Montana Environmental Training Center · MSU-Northern
I can count on one hand how many times in a year I’ve let my stress get the best of me. Before, it was one hand a week.
Katie Dolen · Co-Founder, State of Play
I have learned to add space into my own system, and by doing that I have the ability to handle more. It’s the most beautiful thing, and it’s so counterintuitive — by giving more space, I can do more.
Kama Werner · Co-Founder, State of Play
A guidance label
A gentle warning for anyone considering working with Lorca: be prepared to grow. You don’t have to arrive completely open, fearless, or ready to be vulnerable. In fact, you can bring your hesitation, your skepticism, and the parts of yourself you’d rather keep protected.
Somehow, simply by showing up, listening, and trusting Lorca — and yourself — just a little bit, things begin to shift. Lorca has a remarkable ability to create a space that feels safe enough to be brave in, while still inviting you beyond what is comfortable or familiar.
The growth can be subtle at first, and then suddenly you realize you are seeing yourself, your relationships, and the way you move through challenge differently. You don’t have to force it or have it all figured out; you just have to show up, stay curious, and be willing to take a few small risks. If you do, meaningful change has a way of finding you.
Katie Dolen · Co-Founder, State of Play