Leadership, Facilitation and Cultural Practice
How Black Southern cultural memory, lineage, and lived experience shape the way I think about leadership, facilitation, and organizing.
My work is rooted in storytelling and cultural memory, but it does not end there. The histories, rituals, leadership models, and survival strategies carried by Black Southern communities continue to shape how people gather, lead, teach, and build today.
This page reflects the applied side of that work. It is where I name what Black Southern life has taught me about leadership, facilitation, community, and the kinds of structures people need in order to grow, organize, and stay whole.
The Applied Side of the Work
When I say cultural practice, I mean the everyday wisdom, habits, rituals, and ways of being that shape how communities survive and care for one another. I mean the lessons carried through church mothers, kitchen tables, front porches, neighborhood gatherings, movement spaces, and family memory.
I do not approach leadership as a corporate skill set or a performance of authority. I understand it as something shaped by culture, relationship, memory, and responsibility.
That means I pay attention to questions like:
What traditions taught us how to lead?
What has BLACK Southern life taught us about care, endurance, and accountability?
What happens when communities are asked to build without memory?
What does leadership look like when it is rooted rather than performative?
What I Mean by Cultural Practice
My practice is shaped by several traditions at once: Black Southern memory, legal and advocacy experience, facilitation work, intergenerational learning, and the lived contradictions of the South itself.
For a time, I believed justice work lived primarily inside institutions. I went to law school because I believed in the promise of justice, and later I worked in advocacy and organizing spaces that taught me both the possibilities and the limits of that work.
What stayed with me most was not only the campaigns or outcomes. It was what I observed about people: how communities were asked to carry urgency without support, how leadership was too often detached from care, and how even well-meaning spaces could replicate the same hierarchies they claimed to resist.
That tension changed the way I work. It pushed me toward a practice that asks not only what is effective, but what is rooted, humane, and sustainable.
What Shapes My Practice
What we inherit….
shapes how we lead.
Where My Practice Shows Up
I reflect on leadership through the lens of Black Southern life, intergenerational knowledge, and the lessons communities carry outside formal institutions. I am interested in leadership that is relational, accountable, and grounded in memory.
I bring years of experience from advocacy and movement spaces, but I am most interested in what those spaces reveal about power, harm, responsibility, and the need for more culturally grounded models of collective work.
I think deeply about what it means to guide people through difficult conversations, shared learning, and collective reflection. My facilitation practice is shaped by cultural wisdom, not just meeting design.
Part of my practice is helping people understand that culture is not decoration. It is infrastructure. The stories people inherit, the rituals they repeat, and the histories they carry all shape how they lead, decide, gather, and imagine change.
This work refuses the idea that leadership must be extractive, that urgency is always virtuous, or that people must abandon their humanity in order to make an impact.
It refuses the flattening of Black Southern communities into stereotypes, deficits, or political abstractions.
It refuses the notion that facilitation is neutral, that history is separate from the present, or that culture can be ignored in the name of efficiency.
I believe leadership without memory becomes shallow.
I believe organizing without care becomes harmful.
I believe facilitation without cultural grounding misses the people in the room.
What This Work Refuses
Many of the questions and tensions that shape my leadership practice eventually informed the development of the Hot Grease Framework.
The framework emerged from what I have observed in communities, movement spaces, and Black Southern cultural life: people need approaches to leadership and facilitation that honor memory, context, care, and collective wisdom.
If this page names the questions I carry, the Hot Grease Framework is one way those questions have taken structured form.
How This Connects to the Hot Grease Framework
This Is Ongoing Work
Leadership & Cultural Practice is not a finished statement. It is an ongoing reflection on what BLACK Southern life continues to teach me about responsibility, community, and the work of staying human while trying to build something better.
This page exists because I do not believe cultural memory belongs only in the archive. I believe it belongs in the way we lead, the way we teach, and the way we make room for one another now.
If something in this reflection resonates with you, your work, or your leadership, or the communities you are a part of, I would welcome the opportunity to talk.
