Alice Thompson

Foster Youth Advocate

Alice Thompson has led system-level change efforts in Detroit education for decades.

Thompson serves as the CEO of BFDI Educational Services, Inc. She is also the CEO Emeritus of Black Family Development, Inc. where she previously led the organization for 26 years, working to strengthen the lives of children, youth, and families through partnerships that support safe, nurturing homes, schools, and communities. During her tenure leading Black Family Development, Inc. Thompson established two subsidiaries, BFDI Educational Services, Inc., an Educational Service Provider managing Hope Academy, a PreK-8 charter school, and the BFDI Training Institute, which offers statewide and national trainings equipping educators, agencies, and nonprofits with relationship-building and harm-repair tools.

As co-chair of the Michigan Partnership for Equity and Opportunity, and chair of the Education Committee of the NAACP Detroit branch, Thompson urges bipartisan action to increase funding for students from low-income backgrounds, students with disabilities, English-learners, strengthen public spending transparency, and ensure that at least 75% of state education dollars reach school buildings and classrooms. In August 2023, she was appointed by Governor Whitmer to the Growing Michigan Together Council PreK-12 Workgroup. Serving on Detroit’s Workforce Development Board and the Detroit Employment Solutions Corporation Board, she has advocated for youth summer jobs, career-technical-education pathways, and mentorship as integral to the city’s economic strategy. Thompson is chair of Wayne State University’s School of Social Work Board of Visitors and is vice president of the Detroit Regional Charter Leaders.

Alycia Meriweather

School-Community Partnership Leader

Alycia Meriweather brings community partnerships, data, and policy together to build the system of supports Detroit kids need to learn and thrive.

Meriweather serves as deputy superintendent of External Partnerships, Innovation & Whole Child Support for Detroit Public Schools Community District (DPSCD). A DPS graduate, Meriweather has worked for the district for over three decades in a number of roles, including middle school science teacher, lead teacher, science supervisor, curriculum writer, professional-development facilitator, and district administrator.

In her current role, Meriweather steers school health and wellness, student affairs and advocacy, adult education, and career-technical education while developing partnerships to remove non-academic barriers to learning and extend learning opportunities beyond the classroom. Through her leadership, district chronic absenteeism fell from 79% in 2021-22 to 66% in 2023-24, and health supports available to students and families have expanded at 10 school-based Health Hubs.

Meriweather incorporates student and parent voice and community needs into school policies and initiatives. This led her to advocate for a districtwide behavioral health assessment, the relocation of Davis Aerospace Technical High School at City Airport (opening in fall 2026), and the opening of The School at Marygrove, part of the Marygrove Learning Community, a cradle-to-career learning and teaching campus.

Armen Hratchian

Education Workforce Developer

Raised in a family of teachers, Armen Hratchian believes the path to improving our schools begins with valuing our educators, investing in their retention and development, and raising their voices in education policymaking and system design.

As executive director of Teach For America (TFA) Detroit and its TeachMichigan initiative, Hratchian rallies a broad and diverse coalition around improving schools through investing in the capacity of leading educators. Since 2019, the TFA team has secured and invested over $70 million in state, federal, and private funding for over 1,000 of the state’s best teachers and school leaders across 19 of Michigan’s highest poverty communities, reaching over 150,000 students. This all started, and remains grounded, in Detroit.

Hratchian first started working in education in 2009 as a founding team member of Excellent Schools Detroit, where he led the development of a comprehensive scorecard evaluating all 220 Detroit schools and helped launch multiple efforts that remain strong today, including 482Forward, Detroit College Access Network, and Chalkbeat Detroit. He also served on the Growing Michigan Together Council and was an advisor to the Coalition for the Future of Detroit Schoolchildren.

Curtis L. Lewis, Ph.D.

Teacher Advocate & Curriculum Designer

Curtis L. Lewis, Ph.D. uses over 25 years of experience as a teacher and an education policy advocate to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

Dr. Lewis is the founder and president of Boldly Moving Education Ahead (BMEA), a national education nonprofit focused on building liberatory, human-centered learning environments through educator development, youth leadership, wellness, restorative practices, and innovative school partnerships that support Black, brown, and economically disadvantaged students and communities.

Through his leadership of BMEA, Dr. Lewis has fostered innovative approaches to supporting educators and connecting them with opportunities to use their voices to influence education policy. He also developed Liberating Learners, a model for whole-school transformation that integrates culturally responsive teaching, restorative practices, and trauma-informed care with innovative technologies including AI and project-based learning.

Dr. Lewis serves on Michigan’s Diversity and Equity in the Workforce Advisory Group and the Michigan Department of Education’s Teacher Evaluation and Professional Standards committees. He is an assistant professor and director of the Master’s in Teaching and Curriculum program at Michigan State University.

Imani Foster

Education Organizer & Storyteller

Imani Foster organizes Detroiters around the changes they want to see in schools and elevates their ideas through storytelling.

Foster serves as the communications lead for 482Forward, an education justice organization that supports community members to guide education policy. She also founded and leads an afterschool program, H.E.Y. Black Girl, focused on relationship-building and holistic wellness for young girls and teens.

Foster became an education advocate at age 16, when she critiqued her educational experiences in an open letter that received massive public attention. Also while in high school, Foster helped establish the 482Forward Youth Collective, organizing student-led campaigns around school funding, student voice, and gun reform.

In 2023, Governor Whitmer appointed Foster to the PreK-12 Education Workgroup of the Growing Michigan Together Council. She is an inaugural advisory board member of Detroit Partnership for Education Equity and Research and also serves on Mayor Sheffield’s K-12 & Out-of-School Time Task Force.

Ines De Jesus

Educator & Community Advocate

For over four decades, Ines De Jesus has been an advocate for quality education, specifically for literacy and bilingual education. She has led efforts both in Detroit and statewide to expand the role of community in public education and to elevate the voices of parents and students.

De Jesus moved from Puerto Rico to Detroit at age 10. Her passion for community-driven political action began as a teenager. While in college, she became active in the Center for Chicano-Boricua Studies and was the president of its Latino student advocacy organization, La Unión Estudiantil.

During her 31 years at Detroit Public Schools (DPS), De Jesus has served as a bilingual teacher, high school department head, associate school principal, assistant director of bilingual education, and associate superintendent for human resources. In her executive roles, she helped advance bilingual/ESL education and built a pipeline of bilingual educators in DPS. After retirement De Jesus continued her advocacy and consultancy roles in the areas of community engagement, education equity, community schools, and bilingual education.

De Jesus was an integral member of many education collaborations, including Attendance Works, Community Schools Initiatives, and Every School Day Counts Detroit. She served on the Detroit Public Schools Community District’s Literacy Task Force, organizing community input to shape recommendations for a $94 million right-to-read lawsuit settlement. She is a co-founder and current board member of 482Forward and MANA de Metro Detroit. She also serves on the boards of SER Metro Youth Leadership Academy, All Saints Literacy Center, Urban Neighborhood Initiatives, and Michigan First Credit Union.

Mike Jandernoa

Business Leader & Education Advocate

Mike Jandernoa connects business, philanthropy, and policy to strengthen K-12 education.

Jandernoa is the founder and chairman of 42 North Partners, a family office that focuses on investments, entrepreneurship, and community initiatives. Previously, he served as chairman of the board and CEO of Perrigo Company, a global healthcare supplier.

Coming from a family of educators, Jandernoa has maintained a passion for quality public schools. From the beginning, he has co-chaired the bipartisan Michigan Partnership for Equity and Opportunity, advocating for policies that provide more support to students who need it, including the “Opportunity Index,” which Michigan has since adopted to send additional dollars to support low-income and English-learner students.

Additionally, Jandernoa serves on the Michigan Achieves Leadership Council, an advisory group to Education Trust-Midwest focused on making Michigan a top-10 education state. As a tenured chair of the Business Leaders for Michigan Education Committee, he has led business leaders in publishing research-based recommendations for K-12 funding, accountability, and early literacy. For a decade, Jandernoa has also served as co-chair of the West Michigan Policy Forum Policy Committee.

With his wife Sue, a thirty-year teacher, Jandernoa funded a $4.3 million gift to the University of Michigan to support math teacher preparation, established the Mike and Sue Jandernoa Scholarship Fund at the Ross School of Business, and expanded fellowships at the Ford School of Public Policy.

Dr. Omar Hakim

Public Media & Education Leader

Dr. Omar Hakim collaborates with students, families, and communities to expand equitable learning opportunities through innovative public media and community-based education initiatives.

A Michigan native, Dr. Hakim began his career directly in Michigan schools, serving as a paraeducator, teacher, curriculum and instructional leader, International Baccalaureate coordinator, and school administrator in Troy and Birmingham Public Schools and Detroit Country Day Schools. He later joined Detroit Public Television as executive director of education and currently serves as vice president of education of Detroit PBS.

At Detroit PBS, Dr. Hakim leads local and statewide education outreach supporting families, educators, and students in southeast Michigan and across the state. His current work focuses on early literacy, family engagement, educator support, and connecting trusted educational media with meaningful community experiences. He leads a cradle-to-career education team that supports hands-on learning opportunities including literacy campaigns, STEM events, PBS KIDS community pop-ups, caregiver workshops, and neighborhood-based engagement efforts in communities across Detroit.

Dr. Hakim also leads Detroit PBS’s regional contributions to the Michigan Learning Channel (MLC), Michigan’s statewide public television learning service supporting schools across the state. Under his leadership, MLC has expanded beyond broadcast television to provide digital and community-connected educational resources supporting literacy, STEM, media literacy, career exploration, and educator professional learning for PreK-12 students, families, and teachers across Michigan.. Dr. Hakim also works closely with state leaders, educators, and philanthropic partners to strengthen sustainable support for MLC and expand equitable access to high-quality educational resources throughout the state.

Dr. Seydi Sarr

Immigrant Student Advocate

Dr. Seydi Sarr’s own experience immigrating to the United States as a Black Senegalese woman became the foundation for a career devoted to ensuring that others would not navigate new institutions alone.

That conviction led Dr. Sarr to found the African Bureau for Immigration and Social Affairs (ABISA), a Detroit-headquartered organization serving Black immigrants and refugees through youth development, legal services, resource navigation, and community engagement.

Dr. Sarr has also worked directly within the Detroit Public Schools Community District as a bilingual parent engagement coordinator, providing interpretation support for families, leading workshops on sanctuary policies and rights protections, and serving as a Parent Academy instructor to help caregivers support student learning at home.

Now in her second term on Michigan’s Black Leadership Advisory Council, Dr. Sarr represents Black leadership at the intersection of education and immigration policy, contributing to statewide policy recommendations that shape how Michigan serves its most underrepresented communities.

Venessa Keesler, Ph.D.

Education Researcher & Cross-Sector Leader

Venessa Keesler, Ph.D. influences education policy in Michigan by bringing cross-sector partnerships and bipartisan coalitions together around shared priorities.

Keesler serves as president & CEO of Launch Michigan, a cross-partisan nonprofit improving the state’s public education system through research-based and educator-informed policy recommendations. She brings a background in classroom teaching, state policy, academic research, and nonprofit leadership to her work.

Under her leadership, Launch Michigan is leading Michigan in the development of new graduation requirements for all students, the Michigan Education Guarantee (otherwise known as the MEG). Launch Michigan also published two reports on Michigan’s educator talent pipeline with policy recommendations that contributed to over $1 billion in new state funding for teacher recruitment, training, and retention—with a focus on sustainability for districts like Detroit. Keesler also led the creation of the K-12 District Dashboard, a tool that provides comparative data across Michigan districts and peer districts in top-performing states. Launch Michigan has been influential in securing state investments in dual enrollment, weighted funding, and literacy training. She regularly engages with the Michigan legislature, the United States Department of Education, local foundations, and national education organizations.

Keesler previously served as director of evaluation, strategic research, and accountability for the Michigan Department of Education (MDE), and was later named deputy superintendent for educator, student, and school support. During her time with MDE, Keesler helped found the Michigan Education Research Institute, a research-practice partnership with MDE, Michigan State University, and the University of Michigan. She developed its structure, recruited a cross-sector advisory board, and led the development of a strategic research agenda. Keesler also led the state’s implementation of the Every Student Succeeds Act, including stakeholder engagement and federal negotiations.