WELCOME TO
GRAY SCOPES SOLUTIONS
Where we see things differently.
GRAY SCOPES SOLUTIONS
Where we see things differently.
Gray Scopes Solutions is a Black-woman owned and operated, boutique business service firm committed to supporting our visionary clients with cultivating companies that center care. “Centering care” ensures that everyone has what they need to succeed; both in the teams we lead and the communities we serve.
Admittedly, most of our clients find us needing to repair a faulty focus of care: (1) either overemphasizing it at the expense of their operations (and thus, impact) or (2) disregarding it to the point of missing out on valuable connections with their staff, their consumers, and their communities.
Sound familiar? Schedule your free consultation and learn how we’ve helped hundreds of clients. We’d love to work with you to make yours a company that centers care.
COMPANY HISTORY
Gray Scopes was founded in 2020, by Akima A. Brown, at the height of the global pandemic as a result of her work with her socially-conscious, benefit-based clients.
Both her for-profit nd nonprofit clients were severely understaffed, albeit for seemingly very different reasons. While the for-profits businesses were difficulty retaining quality personnel amidst revenue loss, employees’ reported increase in personal overwhelm, and their heightened caretaker obligations due to COVID-19 facility closures, the nonprofits were growing too fast to find the right fits.
Thanks to federal grants and local stimulus funds, Akima’s clients — like many nonprofits during COVID — were seeing an influx of capital the likes of which they had never known. However, with an appropriate plan of action and effective recruitment, retention, and operational strategy, these social service organizations would find themselves understaffed, overworked, and unable to effectively implement their public care programs.
Being a systems thinker, Akima wondered if these seemingly unrelated issues didn’t have a common theme. After several case studies, it became clear that these issues shared a source: a faulty focus of care. For-profits didn’t put enough emphasis on how care planning could support them internally, while an overemphasis on external care provisions left nonprofits grappling with administrative and operational ineffectuality.
Gray Scopes Solutions was created to foster solutions that bring balance instances and help companies to center their approach to care.
WHO WE ARE
One of the first things people tend to mention when working with us is that we’re not like other solution-generating consulting firms. Our insights, perceptions, and practices are very different. To fully understand why, you have to understand a bit about us and how we came to be. In fact, much of it begins with our name.
“Gray Scopes” is a moniker dubbed by Akima and friends nearly two decades ago when a freak accident stripped Akima’s cornea from her eye, leaving her with impaired, monochrome vision for months. During that time, Akima — heavily reliant on poorly implemented accommodative resources and support — couldn’t help but wonder why things were run this way. Having previously worked with the blind and visually impaired, she often served as an advocate for her peers; however, this new infirmity offered insight to nuances her friends had never shared. It was here that a love of systems thinking and universal design were born.
Since then, Akima has grown into an artist, activist, entrepreneur, and public speaker whose work centers around helping individuals and entities create generative systems that integrate best practices for equity, inclusion, and belonging. She has spent more than 15 years exploring how reimagining power, identity, and accessibility can dismantle “isms” and marginalization.
Thus, Gray Scopes Solutions.
THE WAY WE WORK
At Gray Scopes, we pride ourselves “seeing things differently.” It’s how we’re able to be so effective.
Much like the healing and recovery process needed to restore Akima’s sight all those years ago, Gray Scopes is committed to the process of helping our clients restore, and actualize, their visions by changing the way they perceive care. Just as that debilitative injury has since been reframed and repurposed to empower, we teach our clients how to leverage their own pain points and take informed, inspired action.
Our signature intuitive inquiry process has helped hundreds of individuals and entities, across the country and around the world, to bridge the gaps between their current conditions and preferred outcomes. With a curiosity, not confined by qualitative boundaries, we readily and regularly entwine theoretical, empirical, and creative elements. This methodology of bringing together seemingly opposing attributes into a cohesive and complementary whole is what has permitted us to repeatedly guide our clients to develop and implement the kinds of durable systems and satisfying solutions that they desire… and deserve.