Many equity practitioners stop at the recommendation. Education to Action sees projects to fruition, then measures the impact.
Education to Action started with a belief: that Higher Education holds the key to creating change, but most academics lack the conviction to put their theories to the test. In 2015, after Ferguson, I built the Student Police Unity League at Virginia Tech: Black students and police officers on the same recreational volleyball teams, structured around Intergroup Contact Theory, to test whether sustained, equal-status contact could rebuild trust.
I measured the results honestly. The season was short, attendance fell off, and the sample was small, so most of the findings did not reach statistical significance, with several running opposite to what I had predicted. I reported that plainly in the thesis instead of dressing up a null result.
The program did not prove its hypothesis, but it proved the principle this firm is named for: theory is worth nothing until you build it, run it, and measure what actually happens. Everything below is what that lesson looks like once it is pointed at real problems.
When Kentucky's anti-DEI turn began dismantling the programs that underrepresented communities depended on, we did not write a statement about it. We built free, public infrastructure that does not need state permission to exist. Both platforms below are live right now, free to use, with no login required.
A free, open-source directory of underrepresented businesses in Kentucky, built so people can put their dollars where their values are. It holds 1,464 verified, deduplicated business records across 23 industry categories and nine ownership categories, powered by a Python data pipeline, Claude API field extraction, and a Supabase backend.
Where the state's certification database served procurement officers, this one serves anyone with a dollar to spend, and it survives independent of state-level political will. Money talks. Spend where it counts.
Visit The People's Ledger →Honest, firsthand information about what it is actually like to apply to an organization: ghosting rates, application friction, response times, and outcomes. Every reported experience is scored on a transparent 0 to 100 scale and aggregated by employer, across 545 reviews and 413 companies.
It tracks the foundation, nonprofit, and public sectors alongside everyone else, because accountability should not stop at the doors of the institutions that ask for it most. Exposing the ghosters. Finding the humans.
Visit CandidateVoice.org →Before the platforms, the firm's first work was direct facilitation, for Volunteers of America Mid-States, the regional arm of the national nonprofit serving Kentucky, Tennessee, and West Virginia.
The work began with a six-session Cultural Humility series for Veteran Services and the leadership team in 2021, and it led to two more engagements: Voices for Equity, a six-part series on facilitation skills for social justice conversations, and Managing a Diverse Team, delivered to 60 to 70 supervisors and managers through VOA's Center for Leadership Bootcamp.
Every session was built on the Brave Space framework and grounded in real situations the staff faced, using case scenarios drawn directly from Veteran Services rather than off-the-shelf examples. Each engagement led to the next, the plainest evidence that the work was useful enough to be worth hiring again.
Education to Action is led by Joe Frazier, who has spent fifteen years turning research into measurable outcomes across higher education, corporate, nonprofit, and government settings.
Recognition: Louisville Business First 40 Under 40, Kentucky Colonel, and Non-Profit/Government Organization of the Year at Derby Diversity Week.
Morality without Action is pointless.