Hello, I’m Carlana Charles-McGuire, a Grenadian consultant, writer and the person behind Sankofa.
I have always been someone who stays with a question long after a conversation has ended. I find myself wondering about the story beneath what is immediately visible. How did we arrive here? What shaped the way we think and work? What knowledge have we inherited? What have we forgotten, dismissed or been taught not to value?
Those questions appear throughout my life and work.
Through Paperclip Limited, I work with people, organisations and institutions to strengthen their systems, governance and ways of working. Much of that work involves looking beneath the surface. An organisational problem rarely begins where it becomes visible. It may be rooted in an old decision, a system that no longer serves its purpose, knowledge that left with a former employee or a way of working that everyone inherited but no one stopped to question.
Paperclip helps me examine how the past continues to shape organisations in the present.
Sankofa carries that curiosity into the wider world.
It gives me room to listen beyond boardrooms, policies and formal reports. Here, the person holding valuable knowledge may be a taxi driver, a market vendor, an elder, an artist, a public officer or someone encountered briefly while travelling. Their experiences may never be described as expertise, but they can reveal something important about resilience, leadership, belonging, community and change.
That is where Paperclip and Sankofa meet.
Paperclip asks how people and institutions can work better. Sankofa asks what histories, experiences and ways of knowing should guide that work in the first place. One is concerned with the systems we build. The other pays attention to the memories, values and human experiences carried into those systems.
For me, these are not separate interests. They are parts of the same inquiry.
Being Grenadian also shapes the way I see this work. I come from a small Caribbean country in a world that often treats size, wealth and proximity to power as measures of importance. Yet small places hold complex histories, deep knowledge and ways of understanding the world that deserve to be heard.
The Global South is not an abstract idea to me. It is home. It is a collection of places that have often been told that progress must arrive from somewhere else. Sankofa begins from the belief that our communities are not empty spaces waiting to be filled with outside answers. We carry knowledge too.
I do not approach Sankofa as someone who has everything figured out. I come to it as a curious learner who is willing to listen, reconsider and sometimes leave a conversation with more questions than I had before.
My hope is that Sankofa becomes a place where those questions can breathe. A place where stories are treated as sources of knowledge, where the past is examined honestly and where we become more intentional about what we choose to carry forward.
This is the work behind the website, but it is also something deeply personal. Sankofa allows me to bring together the consultant, the writer, the traveller, the Caribbean woman and the lifelong question-asker without asking any part of me to remain outside the room.