PRINCIPAL CONSULTANT & FOUNDER
De'Zhon Grace
Sondersphere Strategies
A career built at the intersection of community organizing, policy advocacy, and systems-change, now channeling into a practice that helps organizations close the gap between intent and impact.
PRINCIPAL CONSULTANT
& FOUNDER
THE FOUNDATION
Strategy that sees the whole human
/ 'san•der / • n
sonder
The profound realization that each person you pass is living a life as vivid and complex as your own, with their own ambitions, fears, histories, and quietly unfolding stories.
WHY SONDERSPHERE
Strategy begins with seeing people fully.
Most strategies fail not because of bad planning, but because they were built without genuinely understanding the people they were meant to serve. The data was collected. The frameworks were applied. But something essential was missing: the full humanity of the communities at the center of it all.
Sondersphere was founded on a different premise. The concept of sonder sits at the heart of every engagement. It is not simply a methodology. It is a belief that shapes how we ask questions, how we listen, and what we treat as relevant.
When organizations fully see and value the communities they serve, they stop building strategies that extract and harm while still fulfilling the mission. Instead, they start building strategies that fulfill the mission while healing, restoring, empowering, and transforming in the process. That is the shift Sondersphere exists to create.
BACKGROUND
A career spanning the full arc of community change
De'Zhon's work has never fit neatly into one lane, by design. A decade of experience across organizing, policy, behavioral design, and nonprofit leadership means the strategies he builds are informed by what actually happens when the ideas meet the realities of those closest to the challenge.
Community Organizing
Ground-level relational work that taught the difference between engagement that performs and engagement that holds. The foundation everything else is built on.
Applied behavioral psychology work at Ideas42 designing interventions that account for how people actually make decisions - bringing rigor and humility to the gap between intent and behavior.
Behavioral Design
Policy Advocacy
Translating community voice into institutional change, navigating legislative affairs, stakeholder landscapes, and the systems that shape possibility.
Civic Engagement & Narrative Change
Shaping how communities see themselves and are seen through story, strategy and the deliberate cultivation of public voice and civic identity.
Systems-Change
The long view power-building. Understanding how organizations, communities, and structures interact - and where strategic intervention creates durable rather than temporary impact.
Community Violence Intervention
Directing CVI programs at BOSS - leading credible messenger and violence interruption work that demands trust, precision, and the highest stakes for getting it wrong.
Education & Leadership
CREDENTIALS & AFFILIATIONS
EDUCATION
Georgetown University, McCourt School of Policy
Master of Policy Management
University of California, Berkeley
BA, Sociology & African American Studies
FELLOWSHIPS & LEADERSHIP
Center for Public & Nonprofit Leadership
Nonprofit Executive Management Certification
National Urban Fellows
Fellow - equity leadership and policy cohort • Class of 2024
New Leaders Council
Oakland Chapter Co-Lead • Class of 2020
Greenlining Leadership Academy
Fellow - equity leadership and policy cohort • Class of 2019
The shadow work of strategy
A NOTE ON OUR APPROACH
What AI can generate is impressive. But, what it cannot do is sit across from a community member who has been let down by every institution that promised to help them, and earn enough trust to understand what they actually need. That relational work - slow, non-linear, and deeply human - is what Sondersphere is built around.
De'Zhon calls this the shadow work of strategy: the invisible labor of navigating organizational dynamics, cultural nuance, and human complexity that no framework accounts for and no deck can substitute. It is where most strategies quietly fail, and exactly where Sondersphere shows up.
The goal of every engagement is not dependency. It is self-sufficiency - leaving organizations more capable, more connected, and more equipped to carry to work forward than when arrived.
"
The hardest part of any strategy isn't creating it. It's making it move in the real world, with real people, inside real institutions.
DE'ZHON GRACE • FOUNDER, SONDERSPHERE