As a leader, my 9-5, is to build the leadership capacity of others willing to do the work necessary to make this a reality.

As Gardner (1990) states, “To exercise leadership today, leaders must institutionalize their leadership. The issues are too technical and the pace of change too swift to expect a leader, no matter how gifted, will be able to solve personally the major problems facing the system on which he or she presides. So we design an institutional system – a government agency, a corporation- to solve the problems, and then we select a leader who has the capacity to preside over and strengthen the system. Some leaders may be quite gifted in solving problems personally, but if they fail to institutionalize the process, their departure leaves the system crippled. They must  create or strengthen systems that will survive then” (p. 12) As an organizing strategist at Leadership for Educational Equity, a leadership development organization, I am a leader disrupting institutionalized systems of oppression, I’m tasked with developing a pipeline of leaders that under race and other interlocking isms’ that create and maintain educational inequity, if I walk always, there is a pipeline of leaders developed and ready to move into action.  

Most of these students are overwhelmingly, black and brown.

As a social construct, race has everything to do with leadership. Gooden (2012) argues, “Practitioners should first develop a working understanding of individual, institutional, and societal racism. Understanding these terms and distinctions between them will help leaders, aspiring leaders, and those who train them address White privilege and subtle systems embedded within education that work on multiple levels to advantage Whites and subordinate Blacks and those from other racial minority groups (p. 79). If we refuse to recognize the root cause of educational inequity: racism, then we are merely treating the system and allowing its perpetual existence. 

― Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road