Joe Jackson (He/Him)

I’m Joe Jackson, a Black transgender man, trained facilitator, certified mediator, experienced strategist, and organic practitioner of designing and holding process. I founded Shifting Power Collaborative because I believe organizations doing justice work deserve support in bringing their values into everyday practice. For me, that means helping organizations experiment with shifting and sharing power inside their own relationships, practices, and structures as a way of (re)imagining and (re)creating a society where power, resources, and decision-making move justly and equitably. I want to help us explore how we can live into that future today.

My commitment to shifting power is deeply personal. I came up navigating systems as a young person, left high school before graduating, and found 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 inside 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 and social justice experience. After college, I spent five years as a quantitative policy research analyst, developing the data analysis and meaning-making skills that now shape my organizational learning, sensemaking, and culture assessment work. I later moved into DEI policy advocacy and then into independent organizational consulting. For four and a half years, I brought those skills and experiences to 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 nearly nine years of experience supporting organizations to shift practices, strengthen relationships, share power, and deepen alignment with liberation and anti-oppression values. But my greatest qualification for this work is my lived experience as a person existing on the societal margins and who has always occupied the space of being organizationally marginalized. I now hold that marginality as “…much more than a site of deprivation… [but] it is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance” (bell hooks, Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness).

When I’m not working, you might find me singing karaoke with an abundance of silliness, hanging out with my dog friend Dax, 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