About

I was born in Greensboro, North Carolina and raised in Raleigh North Carolina. I went to Davidson College and studied psychology and neuroscience.

After a few years  in  clinical data management at Quintiles and the Department of Psychiatry at UNC-Chapel Hill, I went to work for the State of North Carolina as the Director of Data Management for hurricane redevelopment efforts after Hurricane Floyd.

This experience working with rural communities as they led the way in rebuilding  Eastern North Carolina, led to my early work in the mid-2000s with social entrepreneurship (now impact investing) working with companies, nonprofits, and foundations to find innovative and sustainable  finance models.

My passion and interest in public education always seemed to re-emerge and after serving on the board of directors in 2005 with KIPP in North Carolina, I served as Chief Operating Officer  in 2009. 

After KIPP, I had the itch to try something completely different and challenge myself. I launched Fan Feet in 2011 and, starting from scratch, designed and sold the first officially licensed collegiate high heels. After 5 years designing, branding and selling amazing heels and working with some of the best schools and best customers, I decided my passion was still in public education.

In 2016, I returned to KIPP in NC as the Director of External Affairs and 2017 began work on The North Carolina Fund, again my love for public education in North Carolina speaking loudly to me. 

Roots to Fruits

Tobacco and North Carolina were nearly synonymous for the better part of the 20th century and my parents both grew up on tobacco farms, my mother in Surry County and my father in Jones County. 

Both excelled in high school. Both were first generation college students, yet their paths to college were different. 

My father was 1 of 11 children with older bothers and sisters blazing the trail off the farm to college, all motivated and encouraged by my grandparents, neither of whom were formally educated beyond 8th grade. He attended Davidson College and later UNC-Chapel Hill earning degrees Law and Public Health. 

My mother was 1 of 2 and only made it to college at the suggestion and urging of a high school guidance counselor without whose counsel she probably would have graduated from high school and remained on the farm. She attended Guilford College majoring in education but would later work for the prison system and then become a computer programmer and database guru. 

While these paths to higher education are very different they reflect the seed, root, and soul of what it is to be a North Carolinian, seeing potential and sowing it the fertile soil of education.

What we must not lose in North Carolina is the belief that this potential is in every child and that we are morally bound to keep the soil fertile, to invest our blood, sweat, and tears in  the future, and tend the earth from which we ourselves emerged. 

Roots to fruits.