About
Built around one question: Is anyone better off?
As-I-Am Consulting Group is a translational strategy partner: we move evidence out of the journals and into the room where decisions get made, for leaders who need a clear, evidence-based path forward, whether that's a nonprofit board, a foundation, or a town facing a problem no one's solved yet.
The rings
Five systems, with people at the center
The rings on our home page come from ecological systems theory, the model developed by psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner. It holds that no one lives in a single setting. Every person sits inside nested systems that shape what is possible for them. Our labels put that model in plain language.
- People
- The person or community the work is meant to reach.
- Relationships
- The connections around them: family, colleagues, partners.
- Institutions
- The organizations they move through: schools, employers, agencies, funders.
- Policy and culture
- The rules and norms that shape all of it.
- Time
- Change across every ring, including what history left in place.
You can see the lens applied in Beyond the Score, which reads each West Orange public school's results alongside the layers of context around them.
The name
Where the name comes from
As-I-Am comes from my surname, Asiamah, also spelled Asiama. Akan family names are built from concepts worth remembering, and a 2024 study of Akan naming traces Asiama to essia, a forest tree the Akan associate with firmness.
I borrow the rest from Accra Hearts of Oak, the club I have supported since childhood: never say die until the bones are rotten.
That's the temperament behind the firm. The problems worth taking on are the ones that have already outlasted the usual fixes. And the question doesn't change until it has an answer: Is anyone better off?
The mark
The knot and the morning star
Our mark weaves together two Adinkra symbols of the Akan people: Nyansapo, the wisdom knot of a person who can untie what others cannot, surrounding Sesa Wo Suban, the morning star of transformation, a wheel that turns under its own power. Evidence (navy) and community (terracotta), tied around change that sustains itself.
Read the full story of the mark
The AsIAm mark weaves together two Adinkra symbols of the Akan people of Ghana.
The outer form draws on Nyansapo, the wisdom knot. Nyansapo represents wisdom, ingenuity, and patience, and it carries a specific claim: a wise person has the capacity to untie what others cannot, choosing the best means to reach a goal rather than the most familiar one. That is the work. Organizations come to us with problems that have resisted the standard approaches. We start by understanding how the knot is actually tied.
At the center sits Sesa Wo Suban, the symbol of life transformation: a morning star, marking a new beginning, set within a wheel that turns under its own power. Its placement is the point. Transformation is not an outcome we bolt on at the end of an engagement. It is the center the entire structure is built around, and it has to move on its own once we leave.
The knot is also an honest picture of how systems work. Funding streams, community relationships, data infrastructure, and organizational culture do not run in parallel lines. They cross, bind, and depend on one another. We don't treat those strands separately. We start from the point where they intersect, because that is where problems live and where solutions hold.
And a knot is a structure that gets stronger under tension. Pull on a well-tied knot and it tightens rather than unravels. That is the standard we build to: strategies, measurement systems, and knowledge infrastructure designed to hold when leadership changes, when funding shifts, when the pressure arrives. Not a binder on a shelf. A structure that bears weight.
The colors carry the same logic. Deep navy is the evidence: rigor, analysis, the discipline of asking whether anyone is actually better off. Terracotta is the earth: community, warmth, and the ground truth that no dataset replaces. Neither strand works alone. The mark holds them in tension because the work does.
What we won't do
Structural over symbolic applies to how we sell, too.
Manufacture urgency
No countdown pricing and no invented deadline to rush a decision. We would rather talk with you about what staying stuck costs.
Pad the menu with a decoy
Every tier on our Services page is a real offer that stands on its own, the entry point included.
Send AI-written cold outreach
We grow through referrals and relationships. If you hear from us, a person wrote it.
Leave you dependent on us
We leave behind capability, not dependence. If a system only works while we are in the room, we built it wrong.