Our Leadership

  • Dr. Kia Darling-Hammond

    Dr. Kia (she/her) has been working across education, research, and leadership for over 25 years, occupying roles ranging from camp counselor to COO. Her mission is to increase thriving in the world - especially for those most overlooked and underserved. She focuses on human development, anti-oppression, transformative justice, and healing justice in her work, with a goal to help people and organizations face their fears, cultivate abundance, and develop a principled, perseverant approach to getting free.

    Through decades of work with cbo’s, universities, K-12 schools, think tanks, and foundations she has developed a Bridge to Thriving Framework© (BtTF), which centers wholeness and the lived experiences of people experiencing overlapping oppression. Her particular focus at the intersections of age x sexual orientation x gender x race x disability is grounded in the knowledge that design driven by those furthest from power improves all of our lives.

  • Dr. Raina J. León

    Raina J. León, PhD is Black, Afro-Boricua, and from Philadelphia. She believes in collective action and community work, the profound power of holding space for the telling of our stories, and the liberatory practice of humanizing education. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts, which has published over 900 Latinx voices in its history. She educates current and future agitators/educators as a full professor of education and frequent guest speaker nationwide. She is an emerging visual artist and digital archivist, particularly with StoryJoy, which she co-founded with her mother, Dr. Norma Thomas. She is the lead coordinator for Nomadic Press in Philadelphia and a senior researcher on various grants in education and literature.

  • Maureen Benson

    As a white woman engaged in racial justice work, Maureen donates her time to this project as Operating Director focused on implementing the mission and vision as well as supporting the logistics of day-to-day project management of the many facets of Phase 1 of our fundraising. Maureen focuses on Transmuting White Supremacy and Patriarchy in her own day-to-day engagement with the community, and in her work as a consultant for organizational development and systemic transformation. She has been a high school teacher and principal in Oakland, CA., a Chief Operating Officer of a national racial equity organization, and a lead facilitator and coach for equity with executive teams, boards, and staff at a variety of social impact organizations. As a community member, she has been a Police Commissioner and organizer with local groups dedicated to ending police violence against marginalized communities, specifically Black people who are exponentially targeted by state terror. After more than 20 years of work in education and supporting social impact organizations focused on racial justice and intersectional leadership, she feels even more strongly that we must center healing justice in our movement work with an emphasis on interrupting our personal and systemic perpetuation of historical disparities. Engaging in the creation of Wild Seed Liberation Land, under the direction of the board is a way we can create the space for movement leaders to integrate healing justice in their day-to-day.