You Can Call Me Doctor G

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Shawn’s Work Ethos

My approach is simple:  

Healing is the foundation for real change. I believe:

We can’t transform systems if we don’t transform ourselves.
Leadership rooted in wholeness is stronger than leadership rooted in fear.
Joy and justice belong together.

This isn’t just theory. It’s the compass that guides everything I do.

Press Mentions

A man in a pink sweater sitting at a desk in front of bookshelves filled with colorful books.

Dr. Shawn Ginwright, Ph.D

Trauma and Healing-Centered Engagement Q & A with Dr. Shawn Ginwright, Ph.D

Dr. Ginwright is an associate professor of education an…

Why Rest is Best And why it’s an act of justice

Just after he joined the Ed School in July, after five years…

Testimonials

“Shawn Ginwright’s books illuminate a needed path for our racially divided nation to move from a place of sobering pessimism toward what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and John Lewis referred to as The Beloved Community. Ginwright thoughtfully unpacks this pathway as a staged journey, where each of us as individuals—and within the institutions we occupy—can translate one’s lived experience into the sharing of story, human connectedness, and concerted action in service of full inclusion.”

Robert K. Ross, MD
President and CEO of The California Endowment
“Shawn Ginwright calls upon us to take four pivots that can enable us to engage in deep reflection about our actions and experiences so that we can lead happier, healthier, and more meaningful lives.... an invaluable resource for those who seek to grow, evolve, and make a difference in the world.”

Pedro A. Noguera, PhD
Emery Stoops and Joyce King Stoops Dean of the USC Rossier School of Education
“The Four Pivots is a guide for those of us who believe loving toward racial justice is a worthy endeavor. It is a salve for those of us who know we cannot fight against the powerful forces maintaining racialized capitalism without seeding the ground with the dreams, joys, and promises of what we will become when we all belong. And it is a clarion call for movement leaders who know we need new ways of doing our work that replace exhaustion for laughter, uncertainty for curiosity, and rage for love.”

Carmen Rojas, PhD
President and CEO of the Marguerite Casey Foundation
“Shawn’s work provides us with insight about our current selves and the current state of our struggle, then pivots us to see another world is possible! This is a hopeful guide to moving from internalized ways of being that are not serving us into transforming ourselves into collective coordination to envision and build our just new world.”

Denise Perry
Director of BOLD (Black Organizing for Leadership and Dignity)
“With wisdom, compassion and ‘you feel me’ humor, Shawn Ginwright invites us to care for and heal ourselves as we seek to care for and heal our world. A lifetime of stories and lessons learned—Ginwright’s and others’—are distilled throughout the book and illuminate how so much of what we’ve been taught about social change work is wrong but also how we can make deeper shifts in our values on the path to real justice…”

Cheryl L. Dorsey
President of Echoing Green Fellows
“...Ginwright changes the terms of the conversation about social justice, and puts healing squarely at center in considering the kind of society we want to have and what it takes to get there. He deftly illustrates the deeply intertwined relationship between our social and political work and our inner work—offering a roadmap to a more just society that involves care—and calls us each to lean into the most profound parts of our humanity.”

Na'ilah Suad Nasir
President of the Spencer Foundation

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Flourish

Agenda

I’m proud to co-found and lead Flourish Agenda, an organization dedicated to helping schools, companies, and communities infuse healing into their culture. If you want to see what healing-centered engagement looks like in practice, this is where the work happens.

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