An interview with: Jasmine Parson Williams

The views, thoughts and opinions expressed in this blog are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Land Trust Alliance, its staff, its board of directors or any other individuals associated with the organization.

Each year, March is designated Women’s History Month by presidential proclamation. The observance traces its roots to Santa Rosa, California, when in 1978 the Education Task Force of the Sonoma County Commission on the Status of Women planned and executed a “Women’s History Week” celebration — at the time, they selected the week of March 8 to correspond with International Women’s Day. As the movement spread across the country, a group of women’s groups and historians — led by the National Women’s History Project — successfully lobbied for national recognition, and in February 1980, President Jimmy Carter issued the first presidential proclamation declaring the week of March 8 as National Women’s History Week. Congress would eventually pass Public Law 100-9 in 1987, designating March as “Women’s History Month.”

Below, we speak with Jasmine Parson Williams, CEO and principal consultant at Parson Williams Group, LLC, where she partners with thoughtful organizations to improve the human experience in workplace culture. Jasmine worked closely with the Alliance on the development of its inaugural Communities and Land training modules.

Land Trust Alliance: What is your personal connection to land?

Jasmine Parson Williams: I grew up as a Black kid in the Midwestern suburbs of Indiana. I wasn’t an “outdoors” kid — I was usually inside reading, practicing the piano or violin, and staying far away from the outside. Even so, I still remember the smell of the moist Alabama dirt when we’d visit my grandmother’s acreage in Montgomery. I remember shucking corn and shelling peas from her gardens and watching her neighbors’ cattle roam up to the bathroom window.

I knew land as a giver of sustenance, of beauty. But when I’d walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge at Selma after a family reunion overlooking the river, I would understand land as a receiver of shed blood, of dreams, of the broken promises of a more ideal future. I understood the importance of land in the South and the many ways that the idea would impact my ancestors throughout history. They were workers of the land, but often excluded from the benefits of that work. Restricted movement with laws telling them where they could be, how they could exist there, and what they could “own” in a system that views land as transactional.

The way land holds us, feeds us, homes us and carries us through history is the primary of my connection to the land, holding with integrity the ways land has been weaponized, capitalized and consumerized. And still, I find my most peaceful moments when I go to the land to commune with the natural environment. Simply being able to move across land with a greater freedom than my grandmother was able to in the Jim Crow South. Land connects me to the past and anchors me to the future. Even as our lives transition, the land remains. It will continue as a mechanism of sustenance, as a provider of natural beauty and resources, and it will continue to hold the stories of humanity as we transform for the better.

Land Trust Alliance: You often say your work is not conservation-specific, yet you have worked with many conservation organizations and leaders. What has that work looked like? Is there a lesson to learn here about stepping outside of the conservation “bubble” to further our conservation and community impact?

Jasmine Parson Williams: The core of my work is helping groups of people whose work has intrinsic social value connect it to the larger ecosystem of social and cultural change. This means helping public, private, and nonprofit organizations be better public citizens by understanding how their work impacts society at large and cascading that impact down to the daily strategies of the individual contributors and collaborative teams that carry out the work. This transcends industry.

But, for organizations whose work is culturally impactful and deeply interconnected across disciplines and industries, my work is very much about illuminating the complexity of that interconnectedness and operationalizing it in a way that seeks positive societal impact and change.

I use tools of organizational development as pathways to help organizations be better public citizens — that means caring more about the ways that our best intentions create harm for some communities and developing strategies to address that. It means continuous learning about the ways our organizational practices may perpetuate the harms of larger economic and social systems.

This approach to organizational development and strategy is applicable to any industry. My work with the Alliance and other organizations in private land conservation is the result of the community’s work to meet the moment and examine the fruit of its own historical legacy, alongside a renewed commitment to recognize and reduce harms that its work may produce. There is a lot of nuance involved in that type of reckoning, and coming alongside organizations that are doing that deep examination, thinking, and reworking of their organizational systems is a primary avenue of my work. Thinking about how they interact in their industry overall, the ways they collaborate, who they are collaborating with, who is missing from those collaborations — all of this helps organizations think more holistically and systemically, and to bring that conceptual thinking into overall cultural and operational strategies that show up as 11:13 a.m. decisions that are made by individual contributors every single day.

Land Trust Alliance: We are coming off Black History Month and Women’s History Month. What historical figure do you look up to? How does history influence your work?

Jasmine Parson Williams: I don’t know if there is any one historical figure whom I look up to more than another — I am an intense reader, so depending on the day, I may be deeply intrigued by some sociologist, philosopher, anthropologist or other student of the human experience. I’m intrigued by ideas and questions, and have found many opportunities to explore these things through the works of various historical figures.

My work doesn’t exist without a deep understanding of the historical paths of human behavior and intention. In the work of social impact and nonprofits, we are often working to address some disparity in the human experience. We can’t address those with integrity if we ignore what history can teach us. I’m a firm believer that there is nothing new under the sun and that our human capacity for harm is far greater when we ignore the lessons of history. History gives us a way to mitigate that and leverage our capacity for good. My work is ineffective and incomplete without historical knowledge.

Land Trust Alliance: You were on the content development team for the inaugural Communities and Land training modules that the Alliance recently released. What drew you to this project? From your perspective, how can this foundational training influence how we view and practice the work of land conservation?

Jasmine Parson Williams: I am always up for a task that seems impossible, and this was a pretty ambitious project. If we can understand that every industry impacts and is impacted by societal and cultural systems in ways that we can not even imagine, then we must also educate ourselves on the nature of that impact if we want to be truly transformative in our work, both in land conservation and otherwise.

If the private lands conservation community can view itself as an integral and interconnected part of a greater societal and cultural system, it will immediately illuminate to itself the ways it can exercise its public citizenship for the good of all people. It will immediately illuminate opportunities to collaborate across sectors, it will immediately illuminate the ways that its actions can ripple across society in ways that may burden some and advantage others. Gaining this type of understanding through enhanced learning that intentionally draws these connections will make the sector more effective, more impactful and more kind in its public citizenship.

Land Trust Alliance: What message do you have for land trusts grappling with re-learning the histories that influence our world, including land conservation, today?

Jasmine Parson Williams: If history is now, be mindful of the moment you are in. You are living in the contemporary moments that shape what future generations will know as “history.” The legal and political landscape will continue to change, making the histories that influence our world matter more than ever. And there will be a continued assault on that practice. You must stay the course. This is the moment for which you are training. History is — whether or not we acknowledge it — we can choose to learn from it, honor its legacy, sit in the discomfort of what we learn, and choose the path forward that cements our generation’s offering to the future of the world.