Build and share power with clarity. Practice repair with integrity.
Honest conversation, shared power, and repair across difference—supported by expertise, practices, and structures you and your team can actually use.
Meet April
I’m April N. Baskin—and I work by invitation.
I don’t believe in pushing people into transformation.
I’m much more interested in elevating the quality of your process than prescribing an outcome. I trust your brilliant mind to do that.
This work is intimate, courageous, and consequential—so it’s built on explicit consent, resonance, and readiness. When there’s a true “yes,” we move with clarity, courage, and care.
The experience I bring (in brief)
Multi-award-winning social justice and DEI+ leader with 25+ years of experience
Guided culture change across 300+ organizations
Senior executive leadership across 5 organizations (plus multiple board governance roles)
Former DEI+ Vice President of a $90M nonprofit
Black & Indigenous ordained Kohenet (feminist, Earth-based Jewish priestess) and Hoodoo practitioner
Tufts University alum; research experience with Harvard Kennedy School
Senior Advisor to the Disability Culture Lab; Recognized as a Faith Leader to Watch by the Center for American Progress
“It was all a dream…”
Joyous Justice isn’t just a social justice leadership coaching and consulting practice the founder launched to contribute and earn an income. I launched Joyous Justice to pursue a visionary, radical dream of what is possible for us and our beautiful, aching world. I launched Joyous Justice in 2018 with the sole intention of bridging oppressively designed divisions and silos to help individuals, teams, and communities access their boldest visions, leverage more of their individual and collective power, and have so much more fun and fulfillment along the way.
Photo Credit: Jill Peltzman
Strategy, spirit, and systems—held in the same steady hands.
For more than two decades, I’ve guided leaders, communities, and institutions through change that touches identity, power, and belonging—work that can’t be reduced to a training, a statement, or a one-time plan. I’ve served in senior executive roles and I’ve partnered with hundreds of organizations navigating the real tension between what they say they value and what their systems actually reinforce.
My work is rooted in an insistence that justice can and must be advanced without chronic and unnecessary suffering (isolation, fear, perfectionism, intractable conflict, etc.)—and that accountability can be real without judgement and shame as its drivers. I’m here for the leaders who want shared power to be more than a philosophy, and repair to be more than an aspiration.
Joyous Justice exists to make progress toward liberation more powerful, inspiring, and pleasurable.
A lot of leaders and teams mean what they say. The problem isn’t sincerity. The day-to-day “operating system” hasn’t caught up: unclear decision-making, unspoken power dynamics, thin conflict practices, and too much responsibility living in people’s minds instead of in shared agreements and supportive structures.
Joyous Justice helps you build what’s missing so your leadership can hold, and even strategically evolve, when pressure rises:
clearer decisions and cleaner scopes of work & roles
communication that supports alignment across difference
accountability practices that don’t collapse into punishment or avoidance
repair capacity that strengthens through conflict instead of breaking under it
We don’t force urgency, and we don’t stay stuck in talk. We work iteratively (assess, align, pilot, refine) until the change becomes something you can actually maintain and appreciate.
What We Believe & Who We Serve
A few truths I return to again and again.
The best strategies evolve from courageous truth-telling, especially when it’s messy.
Pacing is power. Slow down… even if only momentarily.
We can compost and repurpose our worst experiences in service of our highest aspirations
Given extensive unhealed histories of harm, reparative and trauma-informed measures should consistently be integrated into strategy
Joy isn’t only resistance, it’s our human and Divine birthright
The future is ours to co-create.
Who We Serve
Two doors. One throughline.
Organizations (B2B): Progressive, justice-rooted (or aspiring) organizations and leadership teams who want their progressive values to show up in hiring, decisions, communication, programming, and culture—not just in statements.
Individuals (B2C): Justice-oriented leaders and professionals seeking steadier rhythms, wiser discernment, and a community of practice that supports sustainable courage.
Ways to Work Together
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Organizational Consulting
Whole-system strategy, facilitation, program development, and leadership support
Explore Consulting Possibilities -
Grounded & Growing
Cutting-edge, social justice leadership training, group coaching + community of practice
Learn about Grounded & Growing -
1:1 Executive Coaching
Focused, whole-person support for a significant personal or professional a leader is looking to achieve
Explore 1:1 Coaching -
The 15-Minute Leader Reset
Practical and extremely reliable reset rituals, on demand, that can support you in a way array circumstances
Coming soon!
The Joyous Justice Podcast
A place to stay close to the work.
If you want to hear how I think—and how shared power and repair become practice—with over 140 episodes and tens of the thousands of downloads, the podcast is a beautiful place to begin. It’s been running since 2020 and April has recently returned to regularly posting episodes.
Bring your values out of the document or your dreams—and into the day-to-day.
If something in you is leaning forward, you’re warmly encouraged to reach out!