Hi, I’m Tessa.
I use she/they pronouns and identify as queer/lesbian. The values that drive my work are rooted in relationality, storytelling, and individual and collaborative practice.
For 25 years, racial equity and justice work have grounded my cohort-building and program design. I’ve decades of experience in coaching, crafting and leading trainings, developing curricula, nurturing and coordinating communities of practice with multi-organizational collaboratives and coalitions. Before starting my consulting business, I worked for a state agency for fifteen years in community food systems—focusing on racial equity, youth, and schools. Before I began this, I taught university for eleven years, in oral history, folklore, creative writing, performance, and ethnography.
Over the decades, I’ve served on numerous boards and advisory committees—for national, statewide, and local organizations and groups—as well as volunteered broadly, supporting work in child education, community activism, food justice, and Black and new farmer land access.
Forever I have been writer, a listener, and a learner. Creativity and somatics inform how I engage with communities and generally how I walk through the world. Today, I live, love and learn on the unceeded lands of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, on a small homestead in rural Hillsborough, central North Carolina. Here, my wife and I live with a passel of critters, grow vegetables/tea/fruit, cook as play and therapy, innoculate anything and everything with mushrooms, and woodswalk as often as possible.
certifications. attagirls.
REPARATIVE COMMUNAL CONSULTING: completion of six month program with Resmaa Menakem’s Education for Racial Equity
FOUNDATIONS IN SOMATIC ABOLITIONISM: completion of six month program with Resmaa Menakem’s Education for Racial Equity
graduate of duke non-profit management program
graduate of EVAP UNC Chapel Hill nonprofit evaluation program
ENVIRONMENTAL LEADERSHIP PROGRAM, Southeastern Regional Fellow: leadership program for social and environmental justice
Contact me if you’d like to learn more about my educational background and professional experience in community-based work, environmental and food justice, yoga/somatics/mindfulness meditation, and folklore/stories/ethnography.
Co-Conspirators. Co-Creators. Collaborators
coming soon