Our People

Guided by a moral imperative and internal, magnetic North Star, Dr. Smith and Dr. Pon were brought together (in the same place, at the same time) in the Pacific Northwest in 2015 to surface and address (aka: disrupt and dismantle) institutionalized racism in educational communities and organizational systems for the greater good of all students, especially those furthest from educational justice and equity.

In short, they wanted to be the kind of educators they never had or experienced during their own K-12 and college journey. As they began to collaborate with each other providing professional development to address adult learning within organizations to better serve all students, they agreed that knowing and talking about the work of equity, racial equity, diversity and/or inclusion was not good enough.  Heidi Schillinger, founder of Equity Matters, calls this fake equity or “fakequity.” Rather, we must be practitioners who move beyond an intellectual, theoretical exercise of “doing equity work” to align what we believe and say with what we do, what is evident and how we live our lives. To do this, we must recognize that all of us have been “mummified” by Whiteness. For children of color, and all students furthest from educational justice, to realize their fullest potential, we must unravel the linens of White Supremacy Culture (historically acknowledging, recognizing and understanding how our current systems where designed for White people, by White people, for the advancement of White people) while collectively re-imagining ways of engagement in organizations and education systems that challenge the status quo. Educate to Liberate Consulting (E2LC) sets out to do just that.