We founded define&empower because we believe that we must radically reimagine the current state of the Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion industry.
When we approach our work through the lens of Black feminist imagination, we have the opportunity to cultivate the creative power we will need to transform how we understand and navigate our differences. By deconstructing existing cultural narratives about race, gender, and sexuality, we help our clients and students create new stories that move us toward more equitable futures.
Our Team
Amanda Bennett
Founder • Director of Creative Vision
Amanda is an educator, consultant, and writer living in Durham, North Carolina. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate at Duke University. Her dissertation centers the work of Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, and Assata Shakur to develop a Black feminist “vocabulary of feeling.” As an educator and storyteller, she cultivates innovative ways of using language to guide people toward internal transformation, self-awareness, and social awareness. She also facilitates a poetry lab, a Black feminist reading group, and an emotional intelligence group for men. Drawing on these facilitation skills, she also works as a consultant and developmental evaluator for Frontline Solutions and TerraLuna Collaborative. Amanda empowers students and clients to imagine the contents and structure of a world in which all people feel loved, valued, heard, cared for, and seen. She describes this framework for a new world in her poetry, essays, and short fiction, which have appeared on her blog and in publications such as Jellyfish Poetry, Murder Journal, The Huffington Post, and The Atlantic.
Connect with Amanda via LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Spotify or e-mail.
Reema Mitra
Advisor
Reema is an interdisciplinary strategist with a background in building brands with purpose and business transformation. She is an MSc candidate studying Innovation Management at London's Goldsmith University where she is focusing on re-imagining traditional systems as well as building frameworks for integrating growth and sustainability. Having worked with companies over the past 14 years, Reema's work lives at the intersection of narrative building and experience strategy. As a former professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, she is passionate about elevating underrepresented communities both in the industry and through advocating for inclusive customer experiences and research. She is a past 3% Conference Speaker and someone who believes that the best solutions put the needs of the most vulnerable at the center. You can hear her talk about this here.
Anastasia Kārkliņa
Consultant
Anastasia is a cultural strategist and PhD-trained researcher with academic expertise in culture and identity. Anastasia specializes in the study of U.S. culture and society, with a focus on critical race, gender, and sexuality studies. Anastasia translates her academic expertise to cultural strategy and brand semiotics. Decoding culture with academic precision, she blends her proficiency in cultural analysis, semiotics, and ethnography with multi-method research frameworks to build culturally intelligent, incisive, and inclusive strategy for brand storytelling. As a formally trained researcher, she is sought to help brands develop cultural intelligence that is sourced from deep research and rigorous critical thinking. Anastasia is a cultural strategist and qualitative researcher at The Village, a boutique agency that works with brands to tell human interest stories that provoke critical thinking.
Bernard Coles IV
Lead Data Scientist
Bernard is a Ph.D. candidate in the sociology department at Duke University. His research applies social network analysis to issues of race and racism. As a primarily quantitative scholar, his work emphasizes the impacts of network structure and racism on outcomes such as victimization and health. Following in Du Bois’ footsteps, Bernard frequently employs innovative methods of data management and visual artistry to display his research in unique, provocative ways. His current work seeks to understand racial differences in professional pipelines that lead some scholars of color towards tenure and others to leave the academy all together. This work is funded by a grant from the American Sociological Association for the advancement of the discipline.