Our Team

  • Deidra Montgomery (they/she), Co-Founder and Co-Owner

    Deidra is a queer Black consultant, sound artist, facilitator, and coach supporting individuals, groups, organizations, and projects that seek to make the world more joyful and just. Deidra plays trombone in Undertow Brass Band and is a trustee of the Rhode Island Chapter of the Awesome Foundation. Deidra holds a B.A. in Music from Amherst College and an M.A. in Arts Administration from Goucher College.

    Deidra primarily takes the lead on activities related to facilitation, agenda development, coaching, and arts administration. They have extensive experience working directly with artists and designing and facilitating organizations and groups to operationalize racial and cultural equity. Deidra leads the team for engagements with arts-based service organizations, especially those focused in the northeastern United States, as she carries strong experience and relationships in that field. Internally, Deidra manages agenda development and meeting facilitation, budgeting, strategic planning, and tech & software support.

  • Danya Sherman (she/hers), Co-Founder and Co-Owner

    Danya supports just and equitable systems change through organizational development and collective creative expression so that communities have the resources they need to determine their futures and thrive. Danya founded and, for seven years, Directed the High Line’s Public Program Department. She was a Senior Consultant on the Research Strategies team at ArtPlace America until its planned sunset in 2020. Her writing and journalism has been published in Shelterforce, Next City, and by Rutgers University Press. Danya holds a Master’s in City Planning from MIT and a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University (CT).

    Danya most often takes lead of community planning and development activities, including research methods and writing. Danya brings her strong relationships in creative community development, specifically on the national scale, and will take leadership with clients in that space. Internally, Danya offers oversight of website development, external communications/newsletter, bookkeeping/financial, and matters related to legal entity.

Our Vision

We are building a world where power, wealth and resources are redistributed. All expressions of culture and wisdom are celebrated in shared spaces, never policed. All workers in the arts, community development, and social change fields have all that they need. Care, effectiveness, integrity, and accountability characterize our organizations, institutions, and public agencies - and they are made up of and/or co-designed by the people they serve. Regular reflection and creative practice are core components of ensuring this.  Ours and other communities’ have what we need to practice and experience joy, beauty, rest, and liberation.

Our Values

  • Interdependence

    We are in community with and accountable to one another. We are better together. 

  • Humanity and Relationality

    We lead with care and relationships. We tailor work to each client.

  • Insight

    We are constantly learning and evolving. We are deep thinkers.

  • Reflection

    We interrupt harmful patterns and practices, and build better ones through greater awareness and intentionality. We are deep listeners.

  • Creativity

    We value artists and creative practices, and want organizations, policies, and entities to do better by us and them.

  • Intervention

    We seek to intervene in harmful and unjust cultural practices and disrupt unequal power dynamics and impact us and those we work with. We help build new systems that create equitable, justice, and culturally regenerative systems, institutions, and organizations.

Our Story

Deidra and Danya met through mutual friends and colleagues in 2018. They found that they both enjoyed each others’ company and had overlapping yet complementary skill sets, values, and interests. They first began working together on the evaluation for the Boston Artists-in-Residence Program, and, finding that their collective brain was more than the sum of their individual ones, have brought each other on to more and more projects over the years. After a thoughtful process to determine shared goals and expectations, they decided to formally join entities and start Congruence Cultural Strategies, founded in early 2024.

How We Work

We are committed to working in transformative ways to build the world we want to live in. We each bring unique skills, experience and relationships that strengthen our collaborative work. We support each other in autonomous decision-making related to these unique skills, and in doing so create distributed leadership that cultivates the power and purpose of each member. We founded Congruence to bring positive things we’ve learned from past work experiences and leave behind those that no longer serve us. We worked with Joanna Gattuso and Nico Chin to develop an organizational structure oriented around our shared vision and values.

Each client project is assigned a Project Manager, based on which member takes particular interest in the project, has cultivated the project, or based on an equitable distribution of work. Project Managers take ownership of the administrative and strategic duties to execute the contract. The other member supports the Project Manager as a thought partner and with specific tasks and activities as needed.