With over three decades of experience and expertise, Sustainable Equity, LLC, is a healing and equity consulting firm based in Jackson, Mississippi. We work passionately at building community trust and fostering fairness. We support with grassroots leaders, municipalities, law enforcement organizations, universities, religious groups, and corporations. Indeed, we will eagerly work with anyone who desires a more just society. We guide our clients through anti-racist education to cultivating interdependence and mutuality. We equip you to create a culture where all are welcome and where everyone thrives.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
– Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963.
Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Why Work With Us?
We've spent years bringing together black, white, and brown Mississippians, the powerful and the powerless, the descendants of Ku Klux Klan members with descendants of their victims. Our efforts have helped make Mississippi a leader in healing old wounds, especially in places most haunted by racial violence.
What informs our work? Human compassion, over 30 years of experience in community building, based on deep, local community engagements; sustained scholarship; and extensive evaluation. We've worked in seventeen states and three countries and we bring all of our experience and examples of challenges and success into our work.
Using stories and historical context, we design bespoke programs unique to your group. Our approach is non-blaming and non-shaming. We offer effective remedies for inequality and extremism.
Our approach equips you to create a culture of connection and truth-telling. It spurs individual and organizational transformation and enables your community, group, business, and organization to instill new practices and policies that repair past injustice. By embracing and celebrating all areas of difference, we can secure sustainable equity for everyone.
Racism and white supremacy function by flattening us out. They render us as simple and often dangerous stereotypes, to ourselves and each other. They transform us from a "who" to a "what."
Therefore, one of the most important pathways we have toward ending racism and white supremacy is in restoring all of us to the fullness of our humanity. We do this by sitting together in circles and sharing our stories. When told within a container of trust and respect, truthful stories, however painful they may be, stitch the frayed fragments of our humanity together into a tapestry of hope and promise.
What is best in us can heal what is the worst in us.
"My enemy is someone whose story I haven't yet heard." Longfellow
What's With the Name?
We get that a lot!
We get that a lot!
“Equity” means “fairness.” Most people think it’s just a financial term. It’s not. It is a call for the golden qualities of impartiality and justice.
But here’s the thing: fairness is never won once and for all time. It has to be won, and then constantly protected. It is a recurring process.
Think of it like tending a garden -- you can’t just weed it one time. If we do not tend it regularly, do the things that must be done to maintain it, the weeds of partiality and injustice will overtake our social gardens of equity and fair play. We have to work diligently to nurture the things we want to keep in our individual lives as well as in society at large.
So, at SE our work is twofold. First, we work to bring forth healing and equity in society. And secondly, we endeavor to sustain it, to keep fairness alive and robust.
“Being heard is so close to being loved that for the average person, they are almost indistinguishable.”
David W. Augsburger
