Happy Anniversary to Us! How an Investment Made our Dream a Reality

Guest Post by Tenicka Boyd, National Director of the Leaders of Color Initiative at Education Reform Now

Just over a year ago today, the team at NewSchools Venture Fund invested the initial seed funding necessary to create the Leaders of Color Initiative. This initiative is the embodiment of years of work to fuse education reform with the authentic needs and agenda of black and brown communities.

The Leaders of Color Initiative was created with two goals in mind:

• To recruit for public office black and brown leaders who are respected in their communities.
• To provide a suite of resources to help these leaders win elections and increase their influence.

Community-based leaders are essential to the sustainability of education equity, yet local leaders who support education values are also the least likely to receive the supportive services necessary to launch their careers. Many leaders of color lack access to the connections and resources needed for good ideas to flourish. Simply put — our society has been not been setting them up with an equal chance to succeed.

In the nearly 30 years since the movement to reform public education in America started, very few organizations have invested in black and brown elected leadership. Education Reform Now has always been keenly aware of the problem. And then this investment from NewSchools provided the early funding to dream up a solution.

I’ve spent most of my life working as a community organizer in black and brown communities across the country. I understand the role of supporting quality elected leaders, and I also understand the deep commitment in these communities to high-quality education. Having organized in communities from Flint, Mich. to the South Bronx, I can say that there has always been an appetite in the community for the next generation of black and brown leadership. And, one of the biggest barriers to increasing high-quality education in black and brown communities is increasing the number of elected officials who support education equity.

After working for more than a year to lay the groundwork, we officially launched the Leaders of Color Initiative in Memphis, TN on May 11, 2018. To get to this launch date, we worked collaboratively with our allies on the ground to find the right fellows to recruit and admit into the program, designed and implemented a curriculum responsive to the particular needs of the community, and invested heavily in on-the-ground community support. We couldn’t have done this work without the investment from New Schools Venture Fund.

Tenicka Boyd is the National Director of the Leaders of Color Initiative at Education Reform Now. Previously she organized traditional district parents in New York City. She spent time in the Obama administration where she worked on domestic policy issues including education, faith based partnerships, and homelessness. An experienced organizer and political strategist, Tenicka graduated from Tennessee State University and the University of Michigan.