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What is Natural Inclination?

Natural Inclination was founded by Amber Sessoms.

Sessoms is an active member of the Pennsylvania Department of Education Equity Task Force, the Pennsylvania Equity State Systems of Support and the Pennsylvania School Board Association Equity Task Force. 

“Natural Inclination LLC supports courageous leaders in cultivating liberatory spaces for individuals to be their full, authentic selves by facilitating courageous conversations about justice, equality, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) to help individuals identify how their lived experiences inform their communication skills, emotional responses, coping skills, and perspective-taking,” said.

According to her LinkedIn bio, Sessoms began the consulting business in November 2019 while she was still a school psychologist at Central Dauphin School District. She left that position in March 2021, according to her official bio, after 12 years on the job, starting in 2008. 

What services does Natural Inclination provide?

On her website, Sessoms wrote, “I’d love to show you how courageous conversations can transform your organization.” On her Twitter handle @Nat_Inclination, Sessoms called herself a “Narrative Disruptor,” “Meaning Maker,” “Radical Connector” and 2020 Pennsylvania School Psychologist of the Year.

In another biography on her Instagram account @National_Inclination, Sessoms added about her credentials, “She consults and advocates for equity and social-emotional learning, and she is a champion on equity and social justice across the Commonwealth.”

Her media kit sold one of her key products: “Liberatory Learning Experiences.” They included the program that South Middleton School District adopted: “Building Emotional Capacity for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (JEDI).”

Natural Inclination seeks to build leadership capacity to:

1. Understand the power of devaluation of minoritized groups
2. Developing the power to disrupt devaluing beliefs
3. Translating these new understandings into a power stance of divestment from policies and practices that maintain inequity.

What K-12 work has the Natural Inclination done? 

PENNYSLVANIA

South Middleton School District

South Middleton School District signed a contract with Natural Inclination as part of an extensive new “JEDI” program it adopted to develop a new “diversity, equity and inclusion program.”

On Sept. 8, 2020, South Middleton School District hired a school psychologist Amber Sessoms as a consultant. 

By late October 2020, South Middleton School District Superintendent Matt Strine and hand-selected local school officials met for the first meeting of a “JEDI” steering committee, soon after launching a strategic plan, called “Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion,” or “JEDI,” to build “safe” spaces that ensure “every student” “develops their own agency and social responsibility by recognizing, naming, and critically interrogating the world to make sense of injustice in order to build a better world.”

Based on a review of the plan by Parents Defending Education, “JEDI” represents a Trojan horse for “diversity, equity and inclusion” ideologues to bring key principles of critical race theory to the school district. 

For months, school board officials ignored parent requests for more details. Finally, they had had enough of the secrecy.

In March 2021, about 100 parents made local headlines at the month’s school board meeting, “questioning materials the district plans to introduce.” 

The parents called themselves the South Middleton Parent Advocates.

The “Meet the Team” page for the “JEDI team” listed 11 members, the superintendent, administrators, teachers, staff and “Dr. Amber Sessoms,” listed as “Consultant.” The link to contact Sessoms took viewers to a website, aninclination.com, for Natural Inclination LLC, a consulting business featuring Sessoms.