Sustainable development requires confronting inequality in all of its interrelated forms– income, wealth, power, recognition, education, health, and technology. If we’re serious about confronting inequality in the democratic world, we want to grow individual citizen and community resilience by way of cross-cultural, functional, and sector partnerships and learning — technology and economic and human development — through the routine practice of “love-based leadership”.
This learning represents a process-oriented, science-based approach drawing from cognitive behavior therapy and Interpersonal Neurobiology (built around Daniel J. Siegel’s work), leading to increased consciousness through the understanding of how mind, body, and relationships interconnect.
In a climate-change-battered, hyper-connected, and information-overloaded world, resilience through human relationships is everything. For example, making necessary major investments in direct services and resilience planning (ability to recover from or adjust easily…), especially in the context of how communities (a unified body of individuals linked by common characteristics, values, work goals, etc.) respond to crisis (unexpected reordering like climate change) does lead to sustainable progress.
Central to this work is the individual citizen—her humanity, inherent power, and resilient nature. She is the key to her community’s resilience and sustainable development, and we celebrate and unleash her power through ground-up, generative relationships forged through cross-cultural, functional, and sectoral learning and practicing leadership disciplines.
My recent needed work with the paradigm-changing grassroots Mexican NGO Psicología y Derechos Humanos PSYDEH reflects these ideas in action. The same can be said of the Mexico City venture Colectivo Cine Social I co-founded, or my professional supper club linking 450+ professionals from 44 countries through attention-building experiences. All is necessary in 2025, my HOW response to WHAT academics, practitioners, funders, and business are saying.
Raised in rural working-class Ohio by a single mother—strong and undereducated and dealing with violence—I didn’t initially understand our power to confront the root causes of inequality. My reality was changed by working across African American experience, art, cross-cultural communications, law, leadership studies, psychology, and technology. Through childhood experiences, applied learning, and a ton of failure, I identified one of my life’s purposes:
IMPACT by awakening people to cross-disciplinary solutions and their full potential as sustainable problem solvers through the generative power of relationship.
This pursuit led me from eleven years in the law and tech to a sabbatical and then the faith and higher education sectors, where I clarified my thinking on how to empower humans to sustainably solve problems. It then led me to Mexico, where I became business proficient in Spanish while applying this thinking towards community-led sustainable development. It now leads me back to Ohio to learn more when doing.
