Are you done performing social justice?
We are living in a time when we are forced to confront the various issues that separate us globally as well as communally and often divide the family as well as our consciousness. Businesses, entrepreneurs, organizations, systems, and individuals must make a dedicated, consistent, and drastic change in every facet of life. Together we seek justice in our society and to begin we must first start with ourselves.
Helping Individuals and Systems to Stay Honest Through Personal Identity Navigation
Our focus on building strong equitable interracial relationships, helps us avoid working with those uninterested in accountability.
The Good Peoples Group and our Center on Interracial Relationships works with individuals who seek to live with integrity in all aspects of their life and work with a focus on individual growth, social justice, historical multidisciplinary learning. Our clients want to do and be better, and they look to us to learn how to make that a reality.
We differ from “diversity and inclusion” consultants because of our emphasis on the importance of identity development and our work to expand the definition of interracial relationships as a way to address societal inequity. In order to create safe and equitable spaces, it is essential that we must first be present and connected with our own experience of the world. We do not simply offer workshops and training but deep, purposeful, and intentional individual or small group work.
Learn By Unlearning
What it takes is what we offer; a space to navigate our own identities and how those identities impact our relationships with others. The most pressing issue we face is the disconnection from ourselves and each other due to messages we have internalized about our identities. Our work is to unlearn these messages together to break the cycle of being complicit in our own oppression and the oppression of others.
Do The Work
Support for Businesses and Individuals
Who We Are
Liana Maneese
Brazilian born, Pittsburgh raised Liana Maneese is an award-winning activist, visionary entrepreneur, doula, and catalyst for creative engagement. She is the founder of The Good Peoples Group and The Center on Interracial Relationships where they use identity navigation as a key component and foundational tool toward building social justice and personal transformation. Growing up as a transracial adoptee, Liana learned early on that her difference would be a source of pain that she would have to transform if she wanted to live a full life. Liana is passionate about providing an educational process that enhances individuals and improves the culture of the world we live in. She believes that through building strong, equitable, and informed relationships, with ourselves first, we can begin to shift toxic societal narratives that have created cycles of trauma for far too long. Liana holds degrees in Marketing (FIDM, Los Angeles), Cultural Studies (Chatham University, Pittsburgh), and Clinical Mental Health Applied Psychology (Antioch University, New England), and is also a trained doula. As a social practice artist whose work centers around interracial relationships and her experiences as a transracial adoptee, Liana has won numerous grants and awards that have allowed adoption narratives to be taken more seriously in the art world and beyond. Always pushing her own boundaries of self-discovery, her story motivates many through speaking, creative projects, and her commitment to understanding people, processes, and self. “Ask why at least three times”
Sydney Olberg
Minneapolis-born Sydney Olberg has a background in international and community development planning, program management and evaluation, Spanish language, and is a trained doula. Sydney now works to merge these fields with identity and social justice at The Good Peoples Group and The Center on Interracial Relationships. Her work in social change philanthropy and organizing led her to dig more deeply into white identity and privilege as a component of diversity work that is frequently under-examined. Her particular passion is working to understand how societal messages about white supremacy are internalized and played out in familial dysfunctional. In particular, she focuses on the way gender and race intersect and how that influences the roles we carry out in our families. She loves challenging herself and others to reflect on the way our identity impacts our interactions and how we move through the world and sees her work as a new doula as deeply connected to this conversation. She writes and particularly enjoys writing about influential women in her family how they’ve shaped her life today.
Listen To Our Post Racial Podcast
We think and talk about the word post-racial a lot. Post-racial or “colorblind” are frequently used to negate the way that this country’s history of race and power were so intimately intertwined and how it affects to this day our media, institutions, education system, norms…everything. Interracial relationships are often portrayed as the way out of our racialized history and that multiracial people will mean the end of white supremacy. 2042 (and some studies say even earlier) is touted as the year that our country will be “minority majority” when white non-Hispanic Americans will number less than half of the total population, a shift that demographers claim to be one of the “most intensive changes in a country’s racial and ethnic makeup in history.”
What challenges does this bring? What has this brought on already? How can we understand our identities and how they impact the lens through which we observe these changes? Our podcast makes a space for people to engage in this conversation as we move through it in real time.