● How well is your organization living its stated equity mission?
● Are you struggling to know how to be effective at confronting injustice at your organization?
● Are you frustrated by the pace of movement at your organization toward justice and equity?
Since 2009, as a cross-racial, cross-gender team, Anika Nailah and Joseph DiCenso have consulted to educators and non-profit organizations working to undo racism and other oppressions and build spaces that welcome all. We integrate concepts of intersectionality while centering race, as we help organizations create more socially just, equitable community.
Offering tools for self-reflection and interpersonal dialogue, we support personal awareness that builds the capacity for more “real” relationships. We urge people, from this foundation, to trust and grow those relationships in order to leverage their privilege and optimize their personal power. As they build this coalition, they are able to change policy, practices and culture, to create a more equitable and socially just institution.
Anika NailahCultural liberationist, fiction and non-fiction author, performance poet, and former instructor at Wheaton, Cambridge, and Smith colleges, Anika Nailah is the founder and former director of Books of Hope, a Boston-area program that helps young people write, publish, and sell their own books.
Residing in New England, providing social justice consulting and writing coaching, she uses the arts to hold healing space to interrupt racism across the USA. Find out more about Anika.
Joseph DiCensoFor more than 25 years, Joseph has been growing his own capacity to live a more socially just life. He has worked from within organizations to create more equitable policies and practices, and has collaborated across race with disenfranchised youth, artists, activists and educators to foment regional progressive social change.
A consultant, trainer, facilitator and coach, Joseph helps leaders, teams and organizations learn, grow and change. He has worked with federal agencies, schools, non-profits and arts organizations. Learn more about Joseph.
Northfield Mount Hermon School | Community Action | Center for Leadership and Educational Equity | Diploma Plus | Gilburg Leadership, Inc.
“I have been in education for nearly 30 years and working with Anika and Joseph has been the best professional and personal development I have ever experienced. My school hired them to work with a group of self-identified anti-racist educators; through movement and music, writing and reflection, dialogue and discourse, and with a delicate balance of compassion and accountability, they facilitated workshops that helped us to discover deeper truths behind our racialized beliefs and actions and to build our skills and our emotional capacity to challenge racism and white privilege. More than helping us “do the work” by examining our racial socialization and deeply-conditioned and deeply-seated white patterns of behavior, they inspired us to live more socially just lives.”
Nicole Hager, Dean of Students, Northfield Mount Hermon
“Anika and Joseph’s facilitation methods, resources, and experience in helping individuals and groups recognize and address institutional racism was transformative for me as a white man who has done a lot of reflection on these issues. They were able to help me and colleagues identify and focus on what’s real for us in our personal lives, our everyday work as educators, and at an institutional level. While it is often difficult and humbling to hold a mirror to ourselves, I value the modeling, the openness and directness with which they pushed us out of our comfort zones in this ongoing work of inclusion and access.”
Tim Relyea, Department Chair, History & Social Sciences, Northfield Mount Hermon
“The work our non-profit organization did with Anika and Joseph greatly deepened how we work with supporting educators and students to lead for equity. We grew our skills and dispositions to facilitate our participants to focus on all the facets of their identity, to tap into their emotional selves and to move boldly into conversations about race and privilege. Anika and Joseph’s guidance set us on a trajectory to better understand ourselves as cultural beings and to lead others toward that same transformative learning.”
Donna Braun, Ed.D., Executive Director, Center for Leadership and Educational Equity