We’re a community of collaborators who are passionate about shifting and sharing power, and honoring the wisdom of historically marginalized communities.

Shifting Power Collaborative is a relationship-centered practice started by Joe Jackson and shaped through community with trusted collaborators. We are facilitators, mediators, strategists, trainers, organizers, culture-builders, analysts, artists, and practitioners who bring our lived experiences, professional backgrounds, political clarity, and practical skills to the work of organizational transformation.

We use the word collaborators because our work is built with people. We bring frameworks, tools, questions, facilitation, analysis, and care. Organizations bring their histories, wisdom, relationships, tensions, hopes, constraints, and possibility. Together, we co-create conditions for people to practice equity, justice, accountability, repair, and shared power in real time.

Our collaborators may come from many paths: movement work, nonprofit leadership, facilitation, mediation, training, research, data analysis, healing practice, cultural work, supervision, organizing, and lived experience navigating systems of power. We value formal education when it supports the work, and we also honor the deep wisdom people build through community, survival, living, loving, practice, study, reflection, spirituality, and years of showing up.

Joe Jackson (He/Him)

Founder and Guiding Collaborator

I’m Joe Jackson, a Black transgender man, facilitator, mediator, strategist, and organic practitioner of designing and holding process. I founded Shifting Power Collaborative because I believe organizations doing justice work deserve support in building the relationships, practices, and structures that help their values become real in everyday work.

My commitment to shifting power is deeply personal. I came up navigating systems as a young person, left high school before graduating, and made my way to university later in life as an adult learner. I studied Gender Studies with a focus on policy and Black Feminist Studies, but my deepest education comes from community, survival, activist spaces, and relationships with people who know what it means to build toward liberation in systems not designed for our flourishing. That education taught me how to turn theory into practice, and how to use academic frameworks in service of action, relationship, and real organizational change.

Professionally, I bring more than two decades of nonprofit, movement, and social justice experience. After college, I spent five years as a quantitative policy research analyst, where I developed the data, analysis, and meaning-making skills that now shape my organizational learning and sensemaking work. I later moved into DEI policy advocacy, internal organizational equity practice, mediation, facilitation, conflict repair, culture assessments, and capacity-building learning experiences. For the last four years, I’ve worked at CompassPoint Nonprofit Services, where I started, designed, and co-led an organizational consulting program rooted in equity, justice, shifting power, and Pro-Black capacity-building practice. Altogether, I bring about eight years of experience supporting organizations to shift practices, strengthen relationships, share power, and deepen alignment with liberation and anti-oppression values.

When I’m not working, you may find me singing karaoke with an abundance of silliness, hanging out with my dog friend, or trying to find my way to a second line on Sundays. I look forward to learning more about you and your organization’s people.


All Things Kind,

Joe Jackson

Community Collaborators

Jamina Ovbude (She/Her)

I’m Jamina and I help people and organizations navigate the conversations that matter most; especially when they feel the hardest to have.

I’m a facilitator, certified conflict resolution mediator, and instructional designer with 15+ years of experience shaping how people learn, communicate, and lead. My work sits at the intersection of conflict management, leadership development, and organizational development where I get to help individuals and teams move through tension, complexity, and change with greater clarity and intention.

Across higher education, nonprofit leadership, and private-sector talent development, I’ve led programs and designed experiences that build capability at scale while still honoring the human dynamics underneath the work.

I hold a certification in Equitable Organizational Development from Stanford University and a 40-hour mediation certification from SEEDS Community Resolution Center, along with degrees in Communications and Spanish from the University of Southern California. My practice is also informed by ongoing study of race, identity, and society.

At my core, I’m focused on this: creating the conditions for honest dialogue, deeper understanding, and forward movement; especially when power, difference, or unaddressed impact are at play.

My approach draws from Vipassana meditation, Generative Somatics, Emergent Strategy, and adult learning theory allowing me to integrate mindset, behavior, and systems-level thinking.

Learn more about me here.

Sean Saifa Wall (He/Him)

I’m Sean Saifa Wall, a Black queer intersex activist, scholar, documentarian, public health researcher, and movement strategist. My work is rooted in racial equity, bodily autonomy, intersex justice, and affirming healthcare for people with intersex variations. I co-founded the Intersex Justice Project, a grassroots initiative by intersex people of color working to end harmful and invasive surgeries on intersex children and build a world where intersex people can live with dignity, self-determination, and care.

I bring decades of activism, research, storytelling, and movement-building to my work, including leadership with interACT, the #EndIntersexSurgery campaign, scholarship on the erasure of intersex people from social policy, and documentary work about family, incarceration, Blackness, HIV, queer history, and intersex history. As a collaborator, I bring an intersectional lens, somatic awareness practice, and a deep belief in ethical research, community empowerment, bodily autonomy, and stories from the margins moving to the center.

Learn more about my work at seansaifa.com.

Simone Thelemaque (She/Her)

I’m Simone Thelemaque, a Black queer mama, facilitator, program designer, mistress of play and experimentation, and lover of imagination as a liberation practice. I bring deep curiosity, joy, Black feminist wisdom, and a commitment to decolonizing systems into my work with programming, culture, community, and organizational transformation.

I spent several years at CompassPoint, a social justice nonprofit capacity-building organization, including the last two years as a Co-Director of the Capacity Building and Consulting program. My work has focused on designing learning spaces, strengthening culture, building capacity, and supporting organizations in moving equity and justice values into practice. I am also trained in Theater of the Oppressed and love designing group experiences that incorporate embodiment, reflection, imagination, and collective practice.

I believe critical self-reflection, community care, authenticity, intuition, and play are essential tools for building more innovative, loving, and sustainable ways of being together.

Learn more about Simone here.