Our Mission

Mission

Planting People Growing Justice Leadership Institute seeks to plant seeds of social change through education, training, and community outreach.

Leaders are readers

PPGJLI is committed to inspiring and equipping 10,000 leaders around the world.

History

Planting People Growing Justice Leadership Institute was designated as a 501 (c) (3) organization in 2017. Our goal was to utilize the arts and humanities to promote literacy and diversity in children’s books.

Leadership Theory- Planting People Growing Justice

Inspired by Dr. Artika Tyner’s research, PPGJLI focuses on the future of social change and community-building through igniting the leadership within each person.

“Planting people” is an organic process, which yields a great harvest over time. It starts from the ground up as a seed is planted until it takes root. This seed represents resistance against marginalization and oppression in order to further the cause of social justice. The seed also represents a partnership between social change agents and their global communities. Together, they are able to build a shared vision of a just society and engage in community-building. As the seed begins to germinate, community members start to view themselves as leaders with the capacity to address their own challenges and realize their power to resist oppression. 

This is an ongoing process of collective engagement, perseverance, teamwork, and diligence. The ultimate result is creating social change which equates to reaping a harvest of justice, fairness, and equity.

The challenges we address are:

• promoting reading

• increasing diversity in books

Our team chose to take on these issues based on our passion for dismantling the pipeline to prison. This is of critical importance due to the connection between illiteracy and future incarceration and the overrepresentation of communities of color in the criminal justice system.

Students who are not proficient in reading are 4x more likely to drop out of school and dropouts are 3.5x more likely to be arrested during their lifetime. 85% of children in the juvenile justice system are not literate.

Our goal is to create new pipelines to success by improving literacy rates and inspiring the next generation of leaders.