About LWOP Media & Consulting Group
Our story
Born from the Weight
of What Was Endured.
Our Lady Reparations
Survivor. Creator. Emblem of the LWOP legacy.
The foundation
Legacy Worthy Of Pain Media & Consulting Group, LLC was not built in a boardroom. It was built in the spaces where survival meets intention — where the weight of what has been endured becomes the raw material of something that must outlast it.
The name is not a metaphor. It is a testimony. There is pain that breaks. And there is pain that, when met with clarity and purpose, becomes the foundation of a legacy worthy of the suffering that forged it. We exist at that intersection.
“We do not ask the world to forget what was done. We demand it remember — and reckon.”
Who we are and why we exist
Mission, Vision & Values
I.
Mission Statement
LWOP Media & Consulting, LLC empowers communities, institutions, and justice-impacted individuals through expert consulting, media production, storytelling, and educational content rooted in lived experience, cultural insight, and trauma-informed practice. We provide high-quality professional services that elevate truth, challenge stigma, and support systems change.
II.
Vision Statement
We envision a world where authentic stories, credible expertise, and culturally grounded education reshape public understanding of incarceration, violence, trauma, and healing. LWOP Media & Consulting strives to become a national leader in restorative-justice media, expert-witness consulting, and transformative storytelling that drives social impact.
III.
Core Values
Authenticity — We speak from lived experience, cultural truth, and professional integrity.
Excellence — We deliver high-quality consulting, media, and educational products that meet professional and institutional standards.
Impact — Our work is designed to shift narratives, influence systems, and create measurable change.
Cultural Competence — We honor the histories, identities, and experiences of the communities we serve.
Integrity — We operate with honesty, transparency, and respect in all business relationships.
Empowerment — We uplift voices that have been marginalized, silenced, or misrepresented.
Innovation — We use storytelling, media, and education to create new pathways for understanding and transformation.
Our Philosophy
The Pillars of the Work
Ancestral Memory
We do not begin with the present. We begin with what was carried — across generations, across borders, across the threshold of survival. Memory is not nostalgia. It is infrastructure.
Reparative Justice
Justice is not a destination. It is a practice — daily, deliberate, and demanding. Every project we undertake is an act of reparation: to history, to community, to the future that depends on our honesty.
Narrative Power
Who controls the story controls the legacy. We work to ensure that the stories of those who have been silenced, erased, or misrepresented are told with the full weight of their truth.
The People Behind the Work
Leadership
LWOP Media & Consulting is built on the authority of lived experience — and led by someone who has earned every credential the hard way.
Brett May
Founder & CEO
Areas of Expertise
Biography
"My credibility doesn't come from a classroom. It comes from living inside the systems I now help dismantle."
Brett May is a lived experience expert, author, media producer, and Independent Forensic Gang Expert (IFGE) with a specialization in cultural context, identity development, and restorative justice. After transforming his life during 24 years of incarceration, Brett has dedicated himself to building systems and stories that serve the communities most impacted by the criminal justice system.
His work spans courtroom testimony, university lectures, documentary media, curriculum development, and organizational consulting. He brings a rare combination of lived authority and professional excellence — the kind that cannot be credentialed, only earned.
Through LWOP Media & Consulting, Brett has built a platform that is equal parts professional services firm and cultural institution — one that exists to ensure the stories, expertise, and legacies of system-impacted people are given the weight they have always deserved.
Brandon May
Chief Creative & Media Officer
Areas of Expertise
Biography
"Creative direction transforms lived experience into work people can see, feel, and understand."
Brandon May serves as Chief Creative & Media Officer, bringing a rare blend of artistry, mastery, and media-driven leadership to LWOP Media & Consulting. As the brother of Founder Brett May, Brandon lived through the impact of a 24-year LWOP sentence from the outside — an experience that shaped his understanding of narrative, justice, and the human cost of incarceration.
A seasoned computer graphics professional, tattoo artist, and owner-operator of a creative studio and recording space, Brandon has spent more than 15 years producing work that resonates with real people. His career is defined by emotional intelligence, adaptability, and the ability to translate raw experience into compelling visual and digital storytelling.
Brandon leads LWOP Media & Consulting Group, LLC’s creative vision and media strategy, overseeing brand identity, digital content, visual communication, and the narrative frameworks that shape how the mission is seen, felt, and understood. His work ensures that every piece of media — from campaign visuals to documentary-style storytelling — reflects both the integrity of the mission and the lived realities of the communities LWOP Group serves.
His leadership embodies the belief that those who have lived through the consequences of the justice system — whether behind the wall or holding a family together on the outside — carry a form of expertise that cannot be taught. Brandon’s creative direction transforms that truth into impact, making the mission visible, accessible, and impossible to ignore.
The Emblem
Our Lady Reparations
She is not a symbol of victimhood. She is a symbol of reckoning. Our Lady Reparations stands at the center of our identity — a dignified queen who holds a quill of empowerment in one hand and hand-scale in the other.
She does not sue for reparations in the conventional sense, she conceives and creates them. She does not ask permission to exist in the fullness of her power. She commands it.
She is the embodiment of Legacy Worthy Of Pain: fierce, purposeful, and utterly uncompromising in the pursuit of what must be built.