Dr. Shelley – Your Courageous Leadership Coach

As the Founder/CEO of Leadership Legacy Consulting, LLC, and Family Legacy 5, a nonprofit supporting the Leadership Legacy Academy, Dr. Shelley is devoted to eliminating the school-to-prison pipeline and creating pathways for success.

Passionate about teaching Cultural Proficiency, Dr. Shelley believes in guiding everyone along the Cultural Proficiency Continuum. She highlights the importance of making intentional choices to promote effective leadership and foster supportive policies in schools, workplaces, and homes.

Specializing in building positive cultures, Dr. Shelley advocates for intentional change across various domains, emphasizing strategic focus, courageous leadership, and thoughtful implementation. She holds degrees from UC Berkeley, CalStateTEACH, and a doctorate from USC, championing intentional equity in education, communities, organizations, and legislation.

Most frequently requested keynotes

Journey to Liberation: Understanding Individual History to Shape Your Collective Future

Cultural proficiency is widely accepted as a necessary element of effective leadership. Overlooking cultural intricacies is not just financially costly but detrimental to organizational productivity and longevity. Using research gleaned from her career in education and leadership, Dr. Shelley shows audiences the value of interacting, communicating, and working with people from diverse cultural backgrounds in settings from classrooms to corporations.

This presentation will help attendees:

» Improve connections by recognizing and responding to the diverse needs of clients, students, colleagues, leaders, and community members

» Navigate the unique challenges posed by their own professional expectations and personal experiences

» Increase productivity, creativity, innovation, and profits by building empathy for equity in the workplace

Healing Our Families Through Courageous Leadership

The Five Pillars of Courageous Leadership—home, relational, personal, professional, and financial—are the backbone of our life’s journey. These vital elements are crucial for leadership at work as well as in the home and can guide us through the complexities and inequalities we encounter in our family lives. Dr. Shelley shows audiences how embracing the Five Pillars is necessary to ensure leadership resilience and success and to heal intergenerational trauma.

This presentation will help attendees:

» Uncover the courage to address inequities in the home and in the community

» Develop historical knowledge, skills, and strategies to show up as a leader in one’s family and support future generations to speak up and influence

» Claim their legacy by focusing on individual, family, and community goals

Courageous Leadership Where We Live, Learn, and Earn: Facing Our Fears, Increasing Our Profits

Our future needs courageous leadership, especially when racism and oppression persistently affect our lives and society. And if leaders can establish their workplace as a safe space, research shows that organizations can increase productivity, connection, AND profits. Dr. Shelley shows audiences why kindness is key to courageous leadership and how, by addressing challenges with compassion, they can create spaces filled with understanding that promote employees’ well-being along with the success of their organizations.

This presentation will help attendees:

» Develop a structure to gather input, discuss, and address tough topics like race, poverty, and policing without shame, blame, or victimization

» Create culturally safe spaces where ALL people can freely bring their whole authentic selves to work

» Identify how courageous leadership that centers “minoritized” employees positively impacts the bottom line

Download Speaker Sheet

If recognizing differences starts at home, Cultural Proficiency must start there too.

For a parent, losing your child to hate is by far the worst nightmare imaginable. We were spared this pain and used the experience to spark a flame for helping people address issues of oppression in the schools, workplaces, and now communities of families. The prices that operationalized hate costs organizations, companies, and families have always been high and are steadily rising. Whether it is in lawsuits, recruiting, training, or retraining employees, mental anguish, shortened lifespans, epigenetic trauma, or broken families, the high price of hate continues to impact us all.

After nearly losing our oldest son to hate in a former sundown community, we embarked on a journey to address the deep-seated biases and inequalities that persist within corporations, organizations, and institutions. Our mission is to foster a more inclusive and compassionate world for all. Thankfully he is doing amazing as a college student-athlete and homeowner, but the experience was traumatizing for our entire family. As an educational family, we recognize that bias and prejudice can begin and spread within homes across America. Our commitment is to promote understanding and inclusivity in every space What started over 15 years ago as an instructional equity consulting organization has quickly risen to become a leader in facilitating interracial conversations about race, using the development of historical racial literacy as a tool to address and understand mental models around race. Working in school districts, cities, police departments, companies, small businesses, and non-profit organizations across America and beyond, we know that developing a shared understanding of the history of race relations helps remove shame and blame and allows us to move forward together. 

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Our Mission at Leadership Legacy Consulting

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