If you have come here to help me then you are wasting your time. But if you have come here because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.
— Lilla Watson
my story
Jo Brownson
I am a racial justice educator, facilitator, healer and continuous (un)learner based in the bay area. I’ve worked in the field of education and racial justice for over fifteen years in K-12 classrooms, schools and districts and now organizations and entities across many sectors through my role as founder of Tangled Roots and co-director of Radicle Root Collective.
As a White, queer, cisgender woman, my area of practice and purpose is in supporting individuals and organizations to understand how Whiteness is operating inside their context, how it intersects with other systems of oppression, and what we can do to mitigate and transform its impacts.
I am the daughter of a minister who moved around the south and midwest as a child. I began teaching in Philadelphia before landing in Oakland (my forever heart home) with my wife, partner and bestie in 2011 where I taught at Fremont High School in east Oakland until 2013. Until 2019, I had the honor of serving as a facilitator and coach with the San Francisco Coalition of Essential Small Schools. There, my work focused on furthering the mission of the organization to transform the beliefs and practices of educators and school leaders in service of more equitable outcomes for their students of color, students living in poverty, and LGBTQ students. In 2019, I began Tangled Roots to apply my knowledge of anti-oppression facilitation, organizational change processes and adult learning to contexts within and beyond the education sector.
Tangled Roots was formed as a way for me to live into my commitment to divest from Whiteness as a daily practice, love fellow White people on their own journeys, act in deep and accountable relationships across difference and support institutional transformation in a variety of contexts.