About Mission Equality
A remote, global team committed to doing business differently and creating our own ecosystem of equality for ourselves and the people we work with.
About Us & Our Values
Mission Equality is a UK-registered Community Interest Company (CIC), limited by guarantee. This means that there is no share capital nor dividends to pay and any profits made are put directly back into the organisation to further its mission. Our intention however is to secure philanthropic funding – not income via sales – to enable us to make our curriculum and educational resources freely available to everyone.
The way we operate at Mission Equality is driven by our values which are embedded across the organisation in the way we do everything. Our values and what they mean to us are:
Equality – We are committed to achieving equality and working in an ecosystem of equality, for everyone. And we mean everyone.
Transparency – We strive to communicate clearly and directly, even when it’s hard; and we commit to sharing our own organisational journey as openly as we can for others to learn from too.
Integrity – We DO what we say we’re going to do. Even when no-one’s looking.
Trust and freedom – An intentional choice to replace the dominant paradigms of power and control and provide the flexibility, freedom and trust for our people to know and determine for themselves what will help them thrive (and we support them to identify this).
Adaptability and agility – Operating from a paradigm of trust and freedom requires practices that allow for adaptability, agility and the ability to meet peoples’ needs, individually and collectively, in every aspect of of their working lives.
Radical Personal Responsibility – Everyone is responsible for leading themselves, first and foremost, before they lead others.
Progression, growth & learning – We believe that a commitment to progression, learning and growing through the challenges we face benefits everyone. This includes a default to questioning the status quo – at every level – individually, collectively and systemically.
Who We Are
We operate our leadership framework based upon a concept of guardianship rather than ownership; this means that at any one time we aim to have at least two guardians in place to guide the direction of the organisation towards its mission, and support the team working on the mission as needed. Read more about the current and former guardians below…
Current Guardians
Lea, a former management consultant at Accenture, has almost two decades of experience as an entrepreneur, remote COO and business owner, leading fully remote teams of diverse employees and contractors around the globe. She was an early pioneer of the digital nomad movement as the founder of the world-renowned blog, Location Independent, and has helped thousands of people create the freedom to work from anywhere.
Lea was most recently the co-founder and COO of another EdTech company based in the USA. Under Lea’s leadership, the company was built as an explicitly anti-racist company fully committed to diversity, equity and belonging to create a safe working environment for Black, Brown and other deliberately disadvantaged communities…until Lea resigned after ongoing racism from her co-founder & CEO!
She now leads Mission Equality as the Strategy & Vision Lead, committed to building the company differently with a foundation of equity, equality and a true ‘people first’ approach.
“My two favourite things about working with Lea:
She is an extraordinary mentor. Lea always, always has an eye to scaffolding in opportunities for growth and is extremely generous with her time and expertise. She intentionally builds capacity within the team and sees her colleagues as whole people. She thinks and communicates in a clear, coherent, and direct manner. I cannot overstate how much of a joy it is to work with someone who is committed to clarity!”
– Mae Ajayi
“I love working with Lea because we share an unwavering commitment to anti-racism and equality. In addition, Lea is a strategic visionary, an excellent mentor and fun to be around.”
– Sharon Hurley Hall
Mae has worked for over a decade in outside-the-box education modalities, applying progressive education principles to facilitate growth for learners from pre-K through to adulthood. Their on-the-ground teaching experience includes time both in and out of ‘the system.’
Mae was formally trained as an educator at the University of Toronto and has taught in a range of institutions from public schools to Nunavut Arctic College, while also creating community programming ‘around the edges,’ particularly geared toward the arts and Disabled youth.
Both a creative and a systematic thinker, Mae taps into their affinity for blending structured frameworks with engaging visuals to create high quality educational experiences from behind a computer screen rather than in front of a classroom. Most recently, they led a team developing progressive education resources for a global audience at a disruptive EdTech company, with a strong emphasis on learner empowerment, diverse representation, and cross-disciplinary learning.
Mae’s passion areas include Neurodiversity justice, issues impacting the LGBTQ+ community, and all paths toward authentic, holistic, accessible and diverse education for every learner at every life stage.
Mae lives in Canada with their partner and children as they work and learn alongside one another at home.
“I trust Mae to bring a balanced, nuanced and truly thoughful approach to all their work; this gives me confidence that any decision we make as a team has been examined from multiple angles and perspectives which is a valuable thing to bring to the table. Mae is full of integrity and a pleasure to work with.“
– Lea Jovy
“Working with Mae is a joy because we both love research and learning and integrating what we’ve learned into an excellent product, plus we laugh a lot.”
– Sharon Hurley Hall
Former Guardians
Sharon Hurley Hall is an educator, writer and anti-racism activist. She previously led the Diversity, Equity and Belonging team at a disruptive Ed Tech startup, where she was instrumental in operationalising a progressive approach to anti-racism across the business.
Sharon is the Founder and Curator-in-Chief of Sharon’s Anti-Racism Newsletter, a twice-weekly online publication sharing global experiences of racism and guidance on better allyship. She is also the author of anti-racism essay collection “I’m Tired of Racism”, and “Exploring Shadeism”, which deals with colourism.
A certified diversity and belonging facilitator and culture assessor, Sharon has facilitated numerous groups empowering participants to work towards anti-racism and equality. Sharon is also a public speaker covering racism, anti-racism and diversity topics.
Building Our Own Ecosystem
At Mission Equality, we are now focused downstream on equipping younger generations to lead to an equal world that benefits everyone. As a UK-based Community Interest Company (CIC), Mission Equality will be fully funded so that this curriculum can be made freely available to anyone. We continue to work upstream with companies and organisations committed to doing business differently. This work now sits with our sibling company, Mission Different.
Mission Different is intentionally a ‘for profit’ company with an intersectionally-diverse global team. This means that organisations, companies and collectives who can commit financial resources to creating change, do so as a primary way of redistributing resources. Additionally, Mission Different redistributes its profits differently; not to shareholders or ‘owners’ of the company but to people from historically and deliberately disadvantaged communities who request financial support.
…As A Path To Equality
We still believe the following steps can help us build a path to equality and, alongside Mission Different, we are forming an Equality Alliance to bring to life a joint vision and ecosystem of equality. Read more about this approach here.
Support The Mission
The curriculum we’re building at Mission Equality will be freely available to all. To do this, we need your support in the form of financial and other resources. Can you financially support the mission?