Hi, I’m Tessa.
I use she/they pronouns and identify as queer/lesbian. I’ve rooted my entire career in relationality, storytelling, and individual and collaboarative practice.
I’ve been engaged in racial equity and justice work for the last 25 years. I’m one of those “wounded healers”—I’ve been there, caused harm, experienced harm, and stuck with the effort to build relationships that are authentic and long-standing. I’ve decades of experience in coaching, designing and leading trainings, developing curricula, developing 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, folklore, community work, food justice, and Black and new farmer land access.
In 2002, I was trained in Kripalu style yoga and taught asanas and mindfulness meditation for just shy of a decade, in classes, one-on-one, and also in senior centers and domestic abuse shelters. Healing and energy work has been a huge part of my adulthood and how I walk through the world. I love learning and am always in some mode of study. I recently became certified in hypnotherapy and past life regressions and studied functional nutrition for two years.
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, innoculate anything and everything with mushrooms, and go woodswalking 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