Introducing Equitable Consultants

A ‘Little Gentle Aggression’ and a Whole Lot of Listening

When I first learned what a food co-op really was in 2022, I had no idea how much the cooperative movement would change me. I didn’t come into this work with years of cooperative experience. I came curious, ready to learn, and bringing what I knew from public health, counseling, equity, organizational culture, community engagement, and psychological safety.

Then co-op people started teaching me. Over the past few years, I’ve spent time with general managers, department managers, board members, frontline staff, organizers, cooperators, and community members across the country. They trusted me with conversations about what was working, what wasn’t, what they wished existed, and what their organizations and people needed. Those conversations changed how I understood cooperatives. They also helped shape what comes next.

So, it feels especially meaningful that on October 6, Fannie Lou Hamer's birthday, I am officially introducing Equitable Consultants.

The date is intentional. Hamer was a civil rights leader, organizer, freedom fighter, and cooperator. In 1969, she founded Freedom Farm Cooperative in the Mississippi Delta as part of a much larger vision for Black freedom and self-determination. Her work recognized that political power couldn't be separated from economic power, land, food, opportunity, and people's ability to meet their basic needs.

I would never compare what I am building to what Hamer built or what she sacrificed. But the way she understood freedom is sewn into how I want to serve. Her work pushes me to keep asking: Who has access? Who has power? Who is missing? Are the people most affected helping define the solution? Are we addressing the conditions creating harm, or simply teaching people how to survive them?

Those questions feel deeply connected to my public health background, my counseling background, what co-op people have taught me, and what I want Equitable Consultants to become.

This wasn’t exactly the plan.

For more than 10 years, I’ve owned Equitable Counseling and Consulting. Going forward, my therapeutic work will live under Equitable Counseling, while Equitable Consultants will focus on supporting food co-ops and other values-aligned organizations.

Launching Equitable Consultants right now wasn't some carefully mapped-out five-year plan. It became the right thing after I made another decision first: choosing my peace and improving my well-being. Sometimes choosing yourself creates enough space to see possibilities you couldn't see before. I didn't choose my well-being because I had a perfectly developed business waiting on the other side. I chose what I needed, and once I did, I could see more clearly what might be possible.

Sometimes choosing peace redirects you toward something you were supposed to be doing anyway. And when that happened for me, co-op folks provided a little additional motivation.

When I became aware that my professional circumstances needed to change, and after the change, people from co-ops started reaching out with what I can only lovingly describe as 'gentle aggression.' They shared what our work together had meant to them and asked some variation of, “Okay, but we're still going to be able to work with you, right?” I don't share that because I believe I'm the only person who can do this work. I'm absolutely not. I share it because those messages helped answer a question I was still answering for myself: Yes. I wanted to keep doing this work too.

Co-ops helped build this.

I didn't sit somewhere by myself and decide what co-ops needed and then create services to sell them. The offerings of Equitable Consultants are solely based on what co-op people have told me they need, what they've told me is missing, and what I've learned while working alongside them.

That includes education and facilitated learning, organizational assessments, employee trust and engagement, leadership and board support, mediation, community engagement, culture and belonging work, IDI administration and support, and customized partnerships. It also includes fractional/advisory services for organizations that need ongoing support around equity, belonging, organizational culture, community engagement, or related work but may not need, or have the resources for, a full-time or part-time position.

My backgrounds in counseling and public health will be intertwined throughout all of it. Counseling taught me to pay attention to people, relationships, communication, conflict, trust, and what happens when people don't feel psychologically safe. Public health taught me to look upstream — at systems, environments, policies, access, power, and the conditions surrounding people.

That means I won't always assume the answer is teaching a GM or employee to communicate better, become more resilient, or attend another workshop. Sometimes we need to ask why so much resilience is required in the first place. Sometimes what looks like a communication problem is actually a trust problem, a power problem, a policy problem, or a systems problem.

That upstream approach is one of the places where Hamer's influence resonates so strongly with me. Her work reminds me that we can't talk about people's well-being without also talking about the conditions surrounding them. In my own much smaller sphere of work, I want to carry that lesson forward by helping organizations look underneath what they're experiencing rather than continually responding to symptoms.

It's also why equity must show up in how I offer services, not only in what I talk about. A small community co-op shouldn't automatically be excluded from meaningful support because it can't spend what a much larger organization can. At the same time, equitable access shouldn't require practitioners to undervalue their labor and expertise. I'm intentionally working on models that hold both realities.

This is already a collective effort.

Something intended to serve cooperatives shouldn't be built in isolation, and thankfully, this hasn't been. There are already people in the cooperative space working alongside me: reviewing materials, asking hard questions, sharing expertise, making introductions, offering feedback, creating things, and helping me think more intentionally about what Equitable Consultants can become. There are organizations and humans contributing their time, talent, creativity, connections, and wisdom.

Fannie Lou Hamer reminds me to keep thinking about power, access, dignity, material conditions, and who gets to participate in building the solution. And co-ops continue to teach me what we can build collectively.

So, here we go.

I’m excited to continue working with people I've already had the privilege of knowing and to meet co-ops I haven't worked with yet. I'm excited to collaborate with other (value-aligned) consultants, facilitators, educators, and practitioners whose expertise can serve this movement. I don't expect to have every answer, and I don't want to build service offerings pretending that I do. I want to keep listening, learning, and figuring out where I and others can be useful.

So launching Equitable Consultants on October 6 feels right. It's a way of honoring a Black woman whose vision of freedom extended beyond gaining access to existing systems and included building something different for her community. I'm not interested in simply borrowing her name or legacy for a launch date. I want the way I serve to reflect something I learned from the way she served: listen to what people need, pay attention to the systems creating the need, and help build conditions where people and communities have more power.

To the co-op folks who checked on me, trusted me, challenged me, taught me, told me what was missing, encouraged this next chapter, and reached out with your 'gentle aggression' to make sure I wasn't going anywhere: I'm still here, and I'm grateful for what this movement has already taught me. Now, I'm excited to see what we build next.

To everyone serving or has agreed to serve as a reviewer, thought partner, collaborator, connector, encourager, or contributor: thank you. Your fingerprints are on this too. There is something beautifully appropriate about building a venture intended to support cooperation with the help of a community of people willing to share what they know.

If you're wondering what working together might look like, have something your co-op has been trying to figure out, or simply want to start a conversation, reach out to me at [email protected]. I’d love to hear from you. My new website will be up and available no later than October 9th, which you can find at equitableconsultants.com

Go drink some water.