Our Team
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Susan Glisson’s achievements reflect a rare combination of scholarship on the history of social justice movements with deep knowledge and experience serving communities haunted by racial violence and trauma as they seek healing, reckoning, and repair. Together, Susan and the communities she serves have created profound community change. In a five-year span from 2002 to 2007, Susan guided multi-racial groups in some of Mississippi's most notorious sites of racial violence to engage in transformative community dialogues that led to unprecedented public acts of atonement and repair:
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the first public apology from “Ole Miss,” for the exclusion of Black citizens for over one hundred years, held on the fortieth anniversary of the riot meant to prevent its desegregation;
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the first public acknowledgement and apology to the family of civil rights martyr Medgar Evers from the town that first arrested him for trying to register to vote;
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an eighteen-month process with a multiracial group of citizens in Neshoba County, which led to the first state prosecution in the “Mississippi Burning” murders of three civil rights workers in 1964;
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a year-long healing and reckoning effort that led to a public apology and honorary high school graduation to the Black students at McComb High School who had been kicked out of school for civil rights activity;
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and, in an astonishing community-led act of contrition resulting from over two years of work, Glisson supported the creation of and formal apology by the Emmett Till Memorial Commission to the family of Till for the miscarriage of justice in his brutal torture and murder
She did it all before the age of forty.
Over the fifteen years since that period, influenced by the marriage of academics and community building, Glisson created innovative framework for the transformation of biased mindsets and inequitable systems that weds building community trust to advocacy and equitable policy development. Born in Mississippi, Susan has now shared The Welcome Table™ in over twenty-five states, from Oregon to Iowa, and New York to California with communities, educational institutions, businesses, police departments and municipalities, as well as faith-based groups, across a range of ages from youth to elders to spur courageous conversations that lead to meaningful local change.
Her approach has become a model for mediating between law enforcement and marginalized community members, an area continues to be part of her firm’s current work. Most recently, Susan’s decades of community-based work in Mississippi helped lead to the removal of Mississippi’s racist state flag in 2020. She co-founded and co-led Sustainable Equity, LLC, a consulting firm that cultivates healing and fosters fairness related to racism and difference from 2016 to 2022 and now leads the Glisson Group, a consulting firm on healing, reckoning and repair, and the Welcome Table Collaborative, a network of committed bridge-builders devoted to creating welcoming, equitable, and prosperous communities. For the last two years, Glisson has facilitated the first reconciliation conversations between all the descendants of Arlington House, both those whose ancestors were enslaved and those who were free. In April, 2023, that family circle, in their first in-person gathering, will issue a call to dialogue and action to the nation to join them in this necessary work.
A native of Evans, GA, Glisson holds two bachelor’s degrees, in religion and in history, a master’s degree in Southern Studies, and a Ph.D. in American Studies from the College of William and Mary. A trained historian of social movements, a skilled educator, and an accomplished facilitator with a gifted capacity for community engagement and youth mentorship. She has been widely recognized for her leadership, including being named a “Boundbreaker: People Who Make a Difference” by NPR in 2016 and a Champion of Justice by the Mississippi Center for Justice as one of "The Courageous Thirteen," who challenged Mississippi's discriminatory HB1523 bill against the LGBTQIA community in Barber v. Bryant in 2016. She has twice been a Salzburg Fellow and was named the Pamela Krasney Moral Courage Fellow at The Mesa Refuge in 2022. She was a 2023-2024 fellow with the Square One Project's Collaborative on Reckoning and Justice at Columbia University. Glisson was a 2024 Advanced Leadership Initiative Fellow (ALI) at Harvard University.
Board of Directors
Annette Hollowell, President
Annette Hollowell wears many crowns — mother, entrepreneur, facilitator and lawyer with a particular calling towards community building, peace work and Black liberation.
As the Principal of the Verbena Group, she holds a variety of experience in the areas of workforce development, organizational health, strategic planning, program coordination and coalition building. Her knowledge is derived from organizing around legal issues, educational training, community-focused leadership development and practices for healing and renewal.
Annette is a manager, land steward and advisor to Foxfire Ranch an 80-acre recreational farm and entertainment venue in the North Mississippi Hill Country that has been in the Hollowell family for more than a century. She is an excellent hostess committed to holding inter-generational spaces for rest, retreat, deep learning, connection, healing and celebration. Her storytelling is rooted in ancestry, culture and Mississippi’s long-standing legacies of Black landownership.
Consistent with her commitment to liberation, leadership development and art as a tool for social change, Annette volunteers on the boards of the Alluvial Collective (formerly the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation), Kids Rethink, and Junebug Productions.
Annette is a mother to three amazing little girls (Selah, Ida and Ruthie). She attended Xavier University of New Orleans before completing a BA in Political Science and a JD from the University of Mississippi. She is a member of the Mississippi Bar Association.
Marc Carr, Director
Marc Carr is a social entrepreneur and philanthropic leader serving as Director of Southern Solutions, a collective impact initiative powered by Ashoka. The initiative identifies, supports, and resources frontline leaders advancing racial, economic, and environmental justice, with a deep commitment to the American South.
Grounded in a passion for justice and equity at both national and global levels, Marc also serves as Deacon for the Social Justice Committee at Concord Baptist Church in Baltimore, Maryland.
Previously, Marc was Program Director at Impact Hub DC, where he supported a vibrant community of social entrepreneurs and innovators. His professional experience also includes work with McKinsey & Company, the United Nations Foundation, and AVIS Ghana.
Marc holds an MBA from Webster University and a BA from the Croft Institute for International Studies at the University of Mississippi. Outside of his work, he enjoys traveling, spending time outdoors, and engaging with Baltimore’s rich cultural life.
Jason Coker, Director
The Rev. Dr. K. Jason Coker is the national director of Together for Hope, the rural development coalition of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. Previously, he also served as the Field Coordinator for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Mississippi.
After nearly two decades of life and ministry in Connecticut, Coker returned to his home state of Mississippi to work for peace and justice in areas of persistent rural poverty. The lessons of human compassion and equality he learned as a minister guide his work in poverty relief.
He is the author of James in Postcolonial Perspective: The Letter as Nativist Discourse (Fortress Press, 2015) and Faded Flowers: Preaching in the Aftermath of Suicide (Smyth & Helwys, 2020), which was just released in August! He also is the co-editor of Bible and Theory: Essays in Biblical Interpretation in Honor of Stephen D. Moore (Fortress Academic, 2020). He the author of The Corporation of God: A Biblical Critique of Global Capitalism (Cascade Press, 2021).
