From 2013 to 2025, I helped transform a Mexican grassroots NGO, achieving 19x financial and 62x total contribution growth. The methodology worked because it confronted inequality’s root cause: citizens unaware of their power and civic responsibilities.
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 must grow individual citizen and community resilience through cross-cultural, functional, and sector partnerships and learning in technology and economic and human development, anchored in 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.
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 work from 2013 to 2025 with the grassroots Mexican NGO Psicología y Derechos Humanos (PSYDEH) reflects these ideas in action, as my white papers on why the work is needed and how it changes the paradigm explain. The same can be said of the Mexico City venture Colectivo Cine Social I co-founded, or my professional supper club linking 440 professionals from 44 countries through attention-building experiences. It is my answer to what academics, practitioners, funders, and business are asking for.
Raised in rural working-class Ohio by a single mother, 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 ten 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 to community-led sustainable development. It now leads me back to Ohio to learn more by doing.
