Introducing
Leah M. Forney
As The Culture Doctor, I work with institutions & organizations to confront the cultural failures embedded in sexual violence prevention and response especially those that continue to harm survivors of color.
Organizations and institutions hire me when existing policies, training, and good intentions are no longer enough, and harm persists despite efforts to do better.
My work challenges institutions to examine how power, culture, and systems shape survivor experiences and how those systems must change to move beyond compliance toward accountability.
Through culturally responsive consulting, interim support, and institutional learning, I help leaders shift practices, rebuild trust, and create environments where survivors are not minimized, dismissed, or retraumatized.
Leah M. Forney, widely known as The Culture Doctor™, is a cultural strategist, social and behavioral sciences researcher, trauma-informed educator, and consultant dedicated to transforming how institutions show up for survivors of sexual violence especially survivors from communities of color.
As the Founder and CEO of Unculture Your Workplace, Leah partners with organizations, institutions, and community-based programs to identify and dismantle uncultured leadership and workplace systems that undermine survivor-centered values in practice. Through long-term consulting, policy and program redesign, strategic planning, and interim capacity support, her work helps institutions move beyond performative allyship and toward meaningful, sustainable change.
Leah’s approach is grounded in her lived experience as a proud Black woman and survivor of sexual violence, combined with over a decade of professional advocacy and research in the gender-based violence and public health fields. She brings a rare blend of cultural authority, systems-level insight, and lived expertise into every space she enters, challenging organizations to confront how culture, power, identity, and trauma shape safety, healing, and accountability.
Widely recognized as a national voice at the intersection of sexual trauma, cultural identity, and systems change, Leah has been featured in over 200 media outlets, including Elle Magazine, USA Today, HuffPost UK, ABC 7, The National Desk, and Authority Magazine. She is the author of What Works for Susan Won’t Work for Tameka: A Culturally Responsive Approach to Sexual Violence Prevention and Response, a widely referenced examination of how traditional, one-size-fits-all frameworks fail survivors of color.
Leah is also the creator and keynote speaker behind her signature talk, What Works for Susan Won’t Work for Tameka: How Your White-Centered & Anti-Blackness Frameworks Continue to Fail Survivors of Color, which challenges institutions to examine how race, culture, and power shape prevention, response, and survivor outcomes.
Leah is not simply teaching cultural responsiveness, she is living it, modeling it, and holding institutions accountable to it. With every keynote, training, coaching engagement, and consulting partnership, she is reshaping the field of gender-based violence and supporting a new generation of culturally rooted leaders and consultants committed to integrity, sustainability, and justice.