Life Lessons: Sharise Johnson – Charlotte Magazine

The consultant has designed SMJ Communications to send a message about equity and representation

When Sharise Johnson was little, her parents would often invite her classmates to their home and on weekend outings. They wanted to give kids with fewer resources and opportunities the chance to try new experiences and explore what suburban Atlanta had to offer. “Even though we didn’t have a ton,” Johnson says, “being able to open up folks’ eyes to opportunity and access was core.” 

It was a theme that has run through her childhood; her time at Hampton University, a historically Black university in Virginia; and her career as a communications specialist. In 2019, she opened SMJ Communications, a consulting firm that targets clients in the education sector. But since then, one of the key messages she’s sent has had nothing to do with those clients. 

Johnson, 36, had noticed that few of her colleagues looked like her and was determined to build a diverse staff and fashion the business as an incubator and launchpad. She now has a team full of women of color, and some have gone on to start their own consultancies. For her, promoting representation is the work that matters. “If I don’t take on that task,” she says, “all of this is really for nothing.”

Here’s Johnson in her own words, edited for clarity and concision. 

I grew up in a suburban town right outside of Atlanta, Georgia, and my parents were very much centered around education. My mom was a schoolteacher who went on to be a school administrator and then a district leader. I was very impacted at an early age by seeing her break barriers. She was the first Black teacher of the year in our town and went on to be the first Black principal at her school.

My parents were very transparent in that, as a Black child, I needed to work twice as hard as my counterparts, if not more, and I had a different standard of excellence that I needed to uphold. That was a constant conversation in our household. They also made it very clear that the privilege that I was afforded—because my mom was in the school system, and I had family that had graduated from college—really helped to put me in the seat that I was in. Their thing was, don’t just sit on that privilege. You need to leverage this opportunity to open doors for other folks who look like you.

In high school, the biggest thing for me was feeling completely out of place. Our school was diverse, but there were very few of us in these advanced courses, and we were placed on a completely different hallway. So folks that looked like me were in a completely different wing of the building. You have the experience of walking into school every day with your friends and then going in a completely different direction. It was almost an analogy for life. Like you are one of the few that can go this way, but everyone else has to go in this direction. That was really impactful early on. It was like, Why? Why me?

I went to Hampton University, which is an HBCU, and for the first time, I was around other thriving, dedicated, motivated students of color that had very similar lived experiences as myself. It opened my eyes: Wait a minute. There’s a ton of opportunities out here, but you have to know about them. You have to have access. And someone ultimately needs to make sure that those things are top of mind for you.

That was the pivotal point, in college, when I learned and truly realized that if you have been afforded this opportunity and this education, now it’s your job to open doors for others so that there continues to be representation. 

I always knew that education was going to be central to what I did in life, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t have a natural passion for teaching and being in the classroom, but I knew I loved the written word. I love to read. I love to communicate. And so early on, I wanted to be a news reporter.

I moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, and became a news reporter and producer for the NBC affiliate station out there. And then I realized, OK, this is not what I want to do. I moved back to my hometown, and that’s when I was afforded the opportunity to really learn more about what I call the education-communication space, something I had never heard about. I was hired to work at Atlanta Public Schools, on the heels of what folks know of as the national cheating scandal, so I got a fast-track course in reputation management, crisis communications, and district community engagement.

I went from helping to support communications at Atlanta Public Schools to leading regional and national communications for Teach for America, to being recruited to lead communications for a very large charter network that had hundreds of schools across Texas and Florida. I had every angle of experience, from the public-district space to the charter-school space to the nonprofit space. But I realized that there were two things happening: There weren’t as many people that really understood the education-communication space and the nuances of that. There are some great folks in education, there are some great communicators, but merging the two takes a real level of expertise. I also realized that there was really no one in that communications consulting space that looked like me.

I wanted to make sure that, as folks were pulling in comms experts and consultants, that Black and brown folks had a seat at the table. Ultimately, a lot of these education nonprofits and school districts were communicating primarily with Black and brown families. We are aware of cultural nuances, how we say things, how we receive information. The average Black family is getting a lot of their information through friends, family, the church, community members. If a communicator is not sitting at the table to have that level of context, a lot of those communications are going fall flat and not reach the intended audience. When I noticed that, I said, “I’ve got to fill this gap.” 

Not only are you communicating with staff who are overwhelmed and often underpaid, but you’re also communicating with parents who have more options for where they can send their students, and parents who often have barriers around technology access. A lot of these messages get lost. Let’s pause before we send out this communication. What are we trying to achieve? What are we trying to say? And are we doing this in a way that’s in service to these intended audiences that have a lot of other things going on? That’s what makes this a very targeted area of expertise, because being in that school-district space daily opens your eyes to better and clearer ways to communicate to families, staff, and communities.

Communication is one of those things that people overcomplicate. At its essence, the power of good communication is knowing who you’re speaking to, what you want to say to them, and what you want them to do with that information. As long as you understand those three core components, you can develop clear communications. It doesn’t take a lot of flowery language or comprehensive visuals. At the end of the day, people just want to know, What is it that I need to know? And what do I need to do with this information?

We had to get really creative with our recruitment efforts, because there’s not a ton of people of color in this education-communications space. We found former teachers, former educators, folks who understood the education space, and then our goal was to teach them and train them around more of the components around communications. We couldn’t just arbitrarily hire folks. We really had to be strategic about who we were bringing on, how we were onboarding them, and how we were training them. But ultimately, we built a solid team, full of women of color at every level: graphic design, social media managers, account leads. And we’re able to be intentional about paying them at a very equitable, high pay rate.

In a city like Charlotte, where you have such rapid growth, it’s really easy for students’ access to communication to get lost. I see it as an opportunity to be able to live in such a great, growing city and an opportunity to remind folks to pause and take a beat because we want to make sure that, in our efforts to focus on education and equity across Charlotte, we’re not losing sight of doing that with student outcomes and student success in mind.

I like to tell folks that I birthed three babies and a business all at the same time, between 2019 and 2022. It was the establishment of this business and the establishment of my family. It was a lot to manage, and it has been a roller-coaster ride. Being a mom to three little Black girls all under the age of 5 has opened my eyes. I always knew this work was important. But for me, this work is nonnegotiable.

ALLISON BRADEN’s writing has appeared in Oxford American, Outside, and Sierra, among other publications. She has contributed to this magazine since 2017.