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"Dr. Shelley,

I realized that much of what I have learned was because of what I was exposed to coming up and while we are a conscious family, I have strived to keep my kids young as long as I could.

As we reflect on the month of October, I must share with you a parenting mess that we had to turn into a message. So, every year my girlfriend who is in love with Halloween creates a theme and wants her friends to participate in what she calls a Glamoween photoshoot and Ladies’ Day Lunch. Well, this year’s theme was The Black Panthers, so you already know I was pumped! I couldn’t wait to get online and order my stuff not only because I would finally be in town for one of these after many years living out of state, but come on now you know that this has me written all over for so many reasons!"

So we do our photo shoot and lunch tradition and I get home and show my 12-year-old daughter the pictures of me and her aunties in The Black Panthers photo shoot that...

When we first got married, we could only afford one vacation a year, and for a while there, we started to dread it because we would take the kids, of course, and it was anything but relaxing. After the stress of traveling with 4, 5, and sometimes all 6 kids, then getting to a resort or a cruise where we would still have to manage schedules, keep them entertained and fed, then try to squeeze in some fun time, it was more exhilarating for them than us. Most of our kids and my husband are extroverts, while my oldest son and I are introverts, so what is relaxing and rejuvenating for them is exhausting for us, and conversely, what we see as relaxing they view as dull. They wanted to be out around people partying and doing activities, and he and I brought a stack of work, books, and paperwork that we wanted nothing more than to be left alone to complete. Vacations have become this delicate dance of balancing and compromising to meet everyone’s needs. By the time we returned,...

Recently, I read a LinkedIn post where a mother spoke about an incident with the students in her son’s upcoming high school classes. Long story short, an African American male student joined his first high school 9th-grade zoom meet and greet group. While awaiting the start of the meeting, a white appearing female student felt comfortably compelled to comment that he looked like a “weed-smoking drug dealer.” He calmly responded, calling out her racially charged comment only to then be gaslighted by other white appearing classmates as they logged on. It wasn’t until another white student called them out for terrorizing this young man that they remotely began to see the error of their ways. Many levels of analysis can be done on the background of this situation and how telling it is about our society when children behaving in a terrorizing way has become normalized.

That will be for another time.

As the focus of this series is about returning...

“We do not inherit the world from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” - African Proverb.

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 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.

We began on a journey to address the very seeds of systemic racism that we know exist in corporations, organizations, and institutions all around us after almost losing our oldest son to racialized hate in a former sundown community. Thankfully he is doing fantastic as a college student-athlete...

"Family leadership is the education our children need most that the educational system was not built to provide!"

– Dr Shelley

• Home leadership
• Relational leadership
• Personal leadership
• Financial leadership
• Professional career leadership