2024 Pitch Night Audience Vote winner At School Board School!
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An experienced executive with a demonstrated history of transformational leadership in both the corporate and nonprofit sectors, Erika L. Watson is the Founder & CEO of the Intersection Collective. In this role, Ms. Watson leads the Intersection Collective and its focus on impacting the lives of children of color with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities, their families, and communities and supporting the evolution of executives on a journey to become more intentionally inclusive in their leadership.
Her leadership, expertise, and oversight continue to inform the organization’s commitment and strategy to deliver exemplary, outcomes-based learning, coaching, advocacy, and community engagement.
Ms. Watson is recognized as a national DEI&A expert, with a career as an equity advocate that spans two decades. Prior to launching the Intersection Collective, Ms. Watson held national equity leadership roles with Easterseals, iMentor, and Leadership for Educational Equity.
She also served on the Equitable Nutrition in Schools advisory council to First Lady Michelle Obama producing the historic Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act of 2010. The 2010 Child Nutrition Reauthorization expanded children’s access to nutritious meals, improved the nutritional quality for school food, supported healthier school environments, and increased nutrition and food system education for millions of students in under-resourced communities.
Erika’s visionary leadership reaches beyond the education sector to include women’s issues and equitable access to employment opportunities. In 2002, she founded Dress for Success in Washington, DC, a not-for-profit focused on helping unemployed and hard to employ women build skills and secure meaningful career opportunities.
To date, Dress for Success has helped more than 30,000 women, many of whom are disabled, BIPOC, formerly incarcerated, and own intersectional marginalized identities in the National Capitol community, along the path toward meaningful employment and financial self-sufficiency.
Ms. Watson is a frequent speaker on topics of inclusive leadership, educational equity, diversity and belonging. She holds an MBA from George Washington University, a BS from Howard University, and a certificate in Diversity and Inclusion from Cornell University School of Industry and Labor Relations. She is a certified Executive Coach and currently lives in Cincinnati, OH with her son, Zander, and their rambunctious puppy, Ozzie.
Kelly Green is an advocate for all things disability awareness, representation and justice. Her company, The Kelly Green Organization, is dedicated to partnering with people managers and corporate leaders, across industries, to create diverse work cultures centered in equity and inclusion. As a black, woman, living with multiple sclerosis, Kelly is passionate about seeing marginalized communities thrive in their careers and livelihoods.
Mildred Boveda, Ed.D. is an Associate Professor of Special Education at Pennsylvania University. In her scholarship, she uses the term “intersectional consciousness” to describe educators’ understanding of diversity and how students, families, and colleagues have multiple sociocultural markers that intersect in nuanced and unique ways. Drawing from Black feminist theory and collaborative teacher education research, she interrogates how differences are framed across education communities to influence education policy and practice.
Aubry Threlkeld (they, them, theirs) is an independent educational consultant. Dr. Threlkeld is the former Myrt Harper Rose ‘56 Dean of Education and Codirector of the doctoral programs in education at Endicott College. Dr. Threlkeld has given more than 100 invited talks internationally in pedagogy, disability studies, 2SLGBTQIA+ studies, Mad studies and cultural studies. During the last 18 years, Dr. Threlkeld has taught at Pace University; the Experimental College at Tufts University; and as a lecturer in Studies of Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. They advise a number of national projects including the Collaborative on
Racialized Disability (CORD) where they focus on improving the lives of Black children with disabilities and formerly co-founded Special Kids, Special Connections at Boston Children’s Hospital with Dr. Judith Palfrey. They also advised a documentary on mental health advocacy and the arts, Orchestrating Change, funded through a Massachusetts Humanities Council, now widely available on public television. They have twenty-five publications focused primarily on the practical work of curriculum development for children and youth with disabilities, trauma-informed pedagogy, and more recently Mad studies. They have a doctorate in education from Harvard University, a masters in science from Mercy College, a masters in business administration from Endicott College, and a bachelor’s of arts from Middlebury College. They position themselves as Mad, Queer, Genderqueer, Neuroqueer, Disabled, and as a white person of Romani descent.
Endia J. Lindo, Ph.D. is a tenured, Associate Professor of Special Education at Texas Christian University (TCU) and core faculty in the Alice Neeley Special Education Research and Service (ANSERS) Institute. She is also Co-Editor of a top research journal in her field, Exceptional Children, past president and executive board member for the Council for Exceptional Children’s (CEC) Division for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Exceptional Learners and Program Chair for CEC’s social justice initiative, project 20/20. Dr. Lindo worked as an elementary resource teacher prior to earning her Ph.D. in Special Education from Vanderbilt University and completing an Institute of Education Science (IES) Postdoctoral Fellowship at Georgia State University.
Courtney Wilt, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. Courtney’s research examines how minoritized youth with disability labels, and their families, experience and counter interacting oppressions, such as racism and ableism, particularly during the transition from k-12 schooling to adult life. She is concerned with building frameworks and practices that disrupt educational inequities during transition planning that lead to desired and sustained outcomes.