What We Do

The challenge with the current racial healing model and landscape is the failure to recognize, identify, and therefore cater to different demographics. Instead the approach is to collapse everyone into a monolithic, single-focus solution. This approach does not serve systems change, instead it entrenches systems harm by traumatizing some, and privileging others. Nuance and specificity are the hallmarks of Emotional Justice, and both are a key factor in our impact through our programming.

 

We built Emotional Justice, our visionary racial healing framework, over a 15-year period through research, assignment and community engagement in six cities, across three countries on three continents: Accra, Philadelphia, London, Cape Town, New York, Chicago. Through deep work across multiple contexts, we've developed a framework that offers insights and tools that can help people move in the world in new ways and set organizations on a new course towards building a more just society.

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Emotional Justice advances an understanding of the emotional perpetuation of harmful systems. No-one is immune from the harm, and no-one is exempt from contributing to dismantle the harm. The key for Emotional Justice is that each demographic – Black, Brown, White - has their own specific work to do. That understanding is the uniqueness that distinguishes our framework, Emotional Justice.

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The Emotional Justice framework creates new language to identify and breakdown the role of the emotional in systems change. That language comprises two elements:-

 

• The Language of Whiteness

• The Emotional Justice Love Languages

 

The Language of Whiteness: a narrative we are all taught – Black, Brown, Indigenous, White – about who we are and our role in the world as ‘leader’ vs ‘learner’. This narrative has four elements.