Roots of the Work
A Gathering of the Proven Sustainable™ Guiding Council
Five members of the Proven Sustainable™ Guiding Council gather to reflect on what drew each of them to this work, and where its principles live in their lives today. Sox Sperry, Ketu Oladuwa, Kelsey Greene, Nichole McIntosh, and Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows), aka Don Trent Jacobs, Ph.D., Ed.D., share what Proven Sustainable means to each of them, and where it lives in their lives today.
In this Proven Sustainable™ gathering, five members of the organization's Guiding Council come together for an intimate conversation about origins, purpose, and practice. Rather than looking outward at the broader world, they turn inward, reflecting on the particular journeys that brought each of them into relationship with this work, and sitting with the question: Where is Proven Sustainable living in each of us today?
Sox Sperry, speaking from Ithaca, New York on the traditional homeland of the Gayogohono (Cayuga) people, part of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, opens the gathering as its founder and facilitator. He developed the idea of Proven Sustainable through his vocation as an educator and curriculum designer, work rooted in decades of relationships with Indigenous and Maroon elders, mentors, and community builders across the planet. From the grandmothers of Taos Pueblo, to a small village in Guinea, West Africa, home to to the Baga people, to the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell, Sox traces how those relationships formed the foundation for an educational project built around three guiding questions:
What are the beliefs and practices for living in right relationship with the earth?
What is required to survive and thrive in the contemporary world?
What is required to live as free people opposing white supremacy?
Proven Sustainable lives for him in the ongoing outreach that has grown from those questions, most recently in work to adapt a children's book by Yurok scientist and activist Brook Thompson into curriculum materials that invite young students into Indigenous worldview through dialogue and reflection.
"It's living in the outreach and relationships that have come forward that invite us to continue to create new dialogue codes within Proven Sustainable to help young people understand their place in the world through questions and dialogue." — Sox Sperry
Kelsey Greene shares her entry into this work through early conversations with Sox Sperry in Ithaca, taking his vision and, as she describes, turning ideas into "pragmatic nuggets." From building the website to facilitating the recorded conversation series, Kelsey has been a connective force in the project's growth. Now in St. Petersburg, Florida, on the unceded homelands of the Miccosukee and Seminole tribes, she reflects on how Proven Sustainable has become what she calls "a whispering elder" in her inner life, a filter through which she recognizes colonized thinking in herself, practices self-compassion, and returns to the wisdom of breath, observation, and listening.
"Proven Sustainable lives as a whispering elder in my heart. It's allowed me to have more compassion for myself and others — and recognize the deep history of all people being removed from the wisdom of land and place through Empire and colonization." — Kelsey Greene
Ketu Oladuwa speaks as a poet, journalist, and community voice from Fort Wayne, Indiana, grounded in the lineages of the Akan people of Ghana and the Yoruba people of Nigeria through his parents. Having survived death row and emerged into decades of spiritual practice, journalism, and community service, Ketu describes Proven Sustainable and Maroon Mindset as a way of life he inhabited long before he had language for it: on death row, in service in Nicaragua, in Guinea where he rediscovered his Afrikan self among a people who received him as though he had "just gone around the corner and come back." For Ketu, these principles connect the resistance of Afrikan peoples across more than 7,000 years of history, and they live today in his work with elders councils, young people at Jennings Center, and every conversation that touches identity, culture, and community.
"Proven Sustainable — a spiritual principle, a spiritual action — requires a consciousness that's deeper than Western mindset, that's deeper than thinking. It's an unfolding of what I have known as someone who has been in resistance for over 7,000 years." — Ketu Oladuwa
Nichole McIntosh, a senior nurse and workforce educator with NHS England, joins from the East of England as a Jamaican immigrant and descendant of Maroons from Jamaica. She describes receiving an unexpected letter from Sox Sperry in April 2021 and feeling immediately called in, moved that something she had shared online resonated across thousands of miles. Five years later, Nichole brings Proven Sustainable's principles into her leadership talks with student nurses and midwives in London, sharing her Maroon ancestry as an act of permission-giving. She has found that when she speaks openly about her heritage, others feel freed to claim theirs, some quietly, some with growing pride.
"It is important for us in the business of life to take time out to think about legacy, because if we don't, it will be lost. The work that our ancestors did will be completely lost." — Nichole McIntosh
Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows), aka Don Trent Jacobs, Ph.D., Ed.D. joins from Mexico's Costa Alegría, on land home to the Huichol, Atua, and Purépecha peoples. He is a hunka relation with the Oglala Lakota medicine horse Teoshpae and spends his summers on Toquat land on the west coast of Vancouver Island. A scholar of Indigenous worldview for over 40 years, Four Arrows found Proven Sustainable through a web search, stopping on a teaching from the Chukchi people about the difference between pursuing gold and tending reindeer, one path exhausting and the other renewing. He describes the site as a "place of security" for his ongoing scholarship, drawing an essential distinction between worldview (which belongs to every creature on earth) and place-based tribal wisdom, which belongs only to those fluent in a language, in ceremony, with multigenerational relationship to a particular place. That knowledge, he says, is dying fast, and Proven Sustainable is an anchor for the urgent work of preserving it.
"Indigenous worldview should be our baseline — instead of having a baseline of five, six, seven thousand years ago, have that baseline start before we separated from nature about ten thousand years ago." — Four Arrows (Donald Trent Jacobs)
Together, these five voices model what the organization aspires to in practice: a council rooted in different lands and lineages, holding a shared commitment to proven sustainable and proven free living. Their conversation is not a presentation. It is a gathering, an act of community in itself.
The Proven Sustainable™ Conversation Series is a fiscally sponsored project of the Center for Transformative Action, a 501(c)3 tax-exempt organization. Any funding directed towards the Conversation Series will go towards production efforts to ensure the the recorded discussions are diligently captured and meaningfully distributed. This Conversation Series and website are not-for-profit and created with the intent of channeling support directly to the Peoples represented.