BARBOURSVILLE, VA  (CVILLERIGHTNOW) – Less than two years after leading a successful movement to achieve equal power for descendants of enslaved workers at James Madision’s Montpelier, James French has launched a nonprofit social impact company called Brownland Leadership Solutions that aims to spread the principle of structural parity to organizations and institutions around the world.

“We were the first institution in the country to implement structural parity, which has since become a gold standard, if you will, in the museum community,” French told Charlottesville Right Now in an interview. Days later, he presented the concept of structural parity and his vision of how it could transform organizations at the SXSW Conference in Austin in a talk titled “Equity and Power: A Renaissance of America’s Institutions.”

“Structural parity… is a governance model,” French explained. “And it can be applied to museums, it can be applied to private corporations or even whole industries, such as artificial intelligence.”

Many of the presentations at SXSW discussed the problems and drawbacks that plague AI including bias, French notes his was one of the few to propose solutions.

“I did so through the lens of a deep dive in history and the evolution of governance models and proposed a detailed opt-in governance framework for the industry adapted from my innovations in structural parity,” he said following the presentation.

French founded the Montpelier Descendants Committee, and after successfully leading the fight to have descendants equally represented on the Montpelier Foundation board, he became the first descendant of enslaved workers to chair the board of a founder’s organization. Brownland, French said, will be a catalyst to promote governance based upon equity and equal stakeholdership.

“It’s really echoing the same principles that Madison enshrined in the Constitution,” he said. “Equality in representation and applying that to the institutional landscape.”

French says structural parity doesn’t just make organizations more equitable; it makes them more resilient.

“When you look at the system that Madison created, it was unique in its day because what it demanded was broad accountability, broader than anything else,” he said. Despite initially granting franchise only to white men, French notes the rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution granted broader rights than what had preceded it. Those rights have become far more inclusive in the years since the Constitution was written, and the system has proven to be resilient, despite challenges and questions about the future.

“It’s worked pretty well up to now,” he said. “And so that to me is a mark of resilience. That’s where we can say broad-based, stewardship based in principles of equity produce resilience. Whereas the alternatives to that, which are kind of top-down, very strictly hierarchical, command-based monarchy, elite-command-based systems of governments, they may be effective in the short term. In the long term, they’re unstable.”

Listen to the full interview on WINA with James French here.

Listen to James French’s SXSW talk here.