What are you leading?
I am the Cofounder and Executive Director of The HadaNou Collective. HNC exists to support students, parents, and communities to transform their schools to create a more equitable society. We do this by finding community-driven leaders doing great work, supporting and developing those leaders to grow their work into a Center, and coordinating these HNC Centers to have a deep, system-level impact. HNC’s five Centers currently include makerspaces, writing centers, performing arts centers, and a farm/sustainability center. The commonality between the Centers is HNC’s Community Co-creation Process: working with the community to build great things, rather than trying to solve problems for communities.
How did your experiences as a fellow inspire or prepare you for what you’re doing now?
Teach for America has provided critical support to help us get where we are now. As a TFA Colorado corps member, the pathway into the classroom and instructional support and training helped me understand what was important to me as an educator through both positive and negative examples.
In 2017, we won the Teach for America Social Innovation Award. Beyond the financial support that this provided, relationships with the SIA team and judges have been incredibly important. Teach for America has a humblingly powerful network, and we have been very fortunate to be plugged into this network. This is true across areas of funding, programmatic partners, mentors, thought partners, and so on.