The Strategy room

Strategic advising for institutions, organizations, and leaders building work rooted in legal empowerment, shared power, participatory practice, and community transformation.

The Strategy Room is a focused 90-minute advisory session for institutions, organizations, and leaders navigating complex questions around legal empowerment, incarceration, participatory practice, shared power, conflict, curriculum design, leadership transitions, and building with directly impacted communities.

This session helps clients move from confusion to clarity, from good intentions to grounded practice, and from stuckness to actionable next steps.

Request a Strategy Room

Who This Is For

The Strategy Room is designed for law schools, universities, legal clinics, nonprofits, foundations, public-interest networks, fellowships, movement organizations, community-based organizations, and leaders with lived experience.

It is especially useful for teams or leaders asking:

• How do we build with incarcerated or formerly incarcerated communities without being extractive?

• How do we create participatory processes that actually share power?

• How do we design legal empowerment curriculum people can use in real life?

• How do we navigate conflict, misalignment, or leadership transition without losing our values?

• How do we support law students, researchers, or staff to engage communities with care, humility, and accountability?

Areas of Advising

• Working with Incarcerated People and Leaders

• Building ethical relationships across prison walls, understanding communication barriers, identifying incarcerated leadership, and designing accountable inside/outside processes.

• Legal Empowerment Curriculum Design

• Turning legal knowledge into accessible, community-centered learning tools, workshops, workbooks, facilitator guides, and training models.

• Participatory Practice & Research Without Extraction

• Supporting teams to move from extraction to relationship, from research as product to research as care, collaboration, and strategy.

• Conflict Coaching & Alignment

• Helping leaders and teams identify the deeper values, needs, beliefs, power dynamics, and unresolved questions underneath conflict or tension.

• Shared Power & Values-Based Practice

• Helping organizations examine whether their structures, processes, and decisions reflect their stated values.

• Leadership & Organizational Transitions

• Supporting founders, leaders, and organizations navigating growth, identity shifts, succession, partnership changes, or new strategic direction.

What’s Included

Institutional Strategy Room 

For organizations, institutions, law schools, universities, foundations, legal programs, fellowships, and movement groups.

 

Includes:

• 90-minute virtual advisory session

• pre-session intake process

• optional staff survey before the session

• review of key context or materials

• facilitated strategy conversation

• follow-up memo with key insights, best practices, risks, opportunities, and recommended next steps

Lived Experience Leader Strategy Room 

For formerly incarcerated leaders, directly impacted leaders, grassroots founders, emerging movement leaders, and people building work from lived experience.

 

Includes:

• 90-minute virtual advisory session

• short intake form

• focused strategy conversation

• follow-up memo with key insights and next steps

What You Will Leave With

By the end of the Strategy Room, clients will have:

A clearer understanding of the real issue or opportunity
A stronger sense of the risks, tensions, and possibilities
Practical next steps rooted in values and strategy
Best practices informed by legal empowerment, participatory practice, incarceration, and movement-building experience
A written memo to support continued reflection, planning, and implementation

About Jhody Polk

Jhody Polk is the Founder and Executive Director of LEAH, the Legal Empowerment & Advocacy Hub, and the Jailhouse Lawyers Initiative. A formerly incarcerated legal empowerment strategist, facilitator, curriculum designer, and movement builder, Jhody has spent years building national networks of incarcerated jailhouse lawyers, designing legal empowerment curriculum, training law students and institutions, and supporting participatory approaches rooted in care, relationship, and community power.

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Her work helps institutions and leaders move from extraction to relationship, from confusion to strategy, and from good intentions to practices that build real power with directly impacted communities.

Important Note

Strategy Room sessions provide strategic advising, facilitation, curriculum guidance, and legal empowerment support. They do not include legal representation, legal research for individual cases, or legal advice regarding specific legal claims.

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