Our Core Focus

We engage Black radical, Black feminist, European and Latin American socialist as well as U.S. capitalist frameworks such as Adaptive Leadership,  in support of organizations and individuals that are building practices that begin to disrupt, or further disrupt, our participation in the Nonprofit Industrial Complex’s systemic oppression. Our work includes facilitation, strategy, evaluation, coaching, and the supporting of predominantly White organizations in creating public antiracist commitments to which they agree to be held accountable.

About Justin

In his work as the Principal consultant of Hillombo LLC, Justin has worked with organizations to support their constituents in the learning and application of the work of Paulo Friere and Pedagogy of the Oppressed, planning that marks a neighborhood as a space for Black liberatory culture and people, learning projects that reduce an orchestra’s reliance and reproduction of White privilege, the creation of collectively agreed-upon benchmarks of antiracism in an arts college, evaluating funding programs with a critical race lens or designing and teaching a series of workshops on pro-BIPOC funding for arts grantmakers. In other words, a range of projects engaging race in the Nonprofit Industrial Complex.

Drawing on critical race, afrocentric, critical pedagogy, Marxist and Adaptive Leadership frameworks, Justin’s interests are relationships between the pedagogical i.e. the designing, doing, and assessing of teaching and learning, and material change i.e. a measurable shift in how resources and power are shared. Prior to starting Hillombo LLC, Justin worked as a Senior Program Officer for Art and Culture at The Heinz Endowments and before this as the Assistant Director of Nego Gato, Inc. Justin is the son of Susan and Clarence Laing, the father of Kufere, Etana and Adeyemi Laing, an Olorisha in the Lucumi Tradition and a member of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity. Justin has a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pittsburgh in Black Studies and Political Science and a Masters in Public Management from Carnegie Mellon University.