Welcome to the IECF Ed Equity Summit, bringing together youth, educators, and community members for a powerful journey of learning, connection, and action. The day includes grounding rituals, immersive learning experiences, a community lunch and small group strategy sessions—all designed to spark intergenerational dialogue and build real solutions for educational justice.
We’ll close with a youth-led call to action and a shared commitment to a more equitable future in education. Thank you for being here!
VIEW THE AGENDA (PDF)MEET OUR SPEAKERS
Dr. Bettina L. Love holds the esteemed William F. Russell Professorship at Teachers College, Columbia University, and is the acclaimed author of the New York Times bestseller Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal. This groundbreaking work garnered the prestigious Stowe Prize for Literary Activism and was a finalist for the LA Times Book Award. Recognized by the Kennedy Center in 2022 as one of the Next 50 Leaders dedicated to fostering inspiration, inclusivity, and compassion, Dr. Love’s impact extends far beyond academia. In 2024, she received the Truth Award for Excellence in Education from Better Brothers Los Angeles and The Diva Foundation.
Dr. Love actively contributes to its mission of nurturing and empowering educators and parents committed to combating injustice within their educational institutions and communities. Additionally, Dr. Love played a pivotal role as a founding member of the Task Force behind the groundbreaking program “In Her Hands,” a significant guaranteed income pilot initiative disbursing more than $13 million to support Black women in Georgia.
Renowned as a highly sought-after public speaker, Dr. Love covers a wide range of compelling topics in her engagements, including abolitionist teaching, anti-racism, Hip Hop education, Black girlhood, queer youth, educational reparations, and the use of art-based education to foster youth civic engagement. Her profound insights and expertise have earned her recognition in various news outlets, including NPR, PBS, The Daily Beast, Time, Education Week, The Guardian, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. In 2018, the Georgia House of Representatives honored Dr. Love with a resolution for her impactful contributions to the field of education. Her bestseller We Want To Do More Than Survive has sold close to 200,000 copies and has become a staple in classrooms around the country. She is a leading voice in the field of education.
Dr. Dena Simmons is a lifelong learner, truth-teller, and abolitionist from the Bronx, New York. She is the founder and executive director of LiberatED, an organization that centers radical love, healing, and justice in education so that all children could live, learn, and thrive in the comfort of their own skin. She is also a visiting professor at the Institute for Racial Justice at Loyola University of Chicago. She is the former Assistant Director of Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, where she supported schools to use the power of emotions to create a more compassionate and just society.
Prior to her work at Yale, Dena served as a middle school educator, teacher educator, diversity facilitator, and curriculum developer. She has been a leading voice on teacher education and has written and spoken across the country about social and racial justice pedagogy, liberatory practices, emotional intelligence, social and emotional learning, collective healing, bullying, and their intersections in K-12 school settings, including the White House, the inaugural Obama Foundation Summit, the United Nations, two TEDx talks, a TED talk on Broadway, and Oprah’s OWN series, Speak Sis. Dr. Simmons has been profiled in Education Week, Edutopia, Learning for Justice, the Huffington Post, NPR, the AOL/PBS project, MAKERS: Women Who Make America, and a Beacon Press Book, Do It Anyway: The New Generation of Activists among other media outlets.
Dena is a recipient of a Harry S. Truman Scholarship, a J. William Fulbright Fellowship, an Education Pioneers Fellowship, a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship, a Phillips Exeter Academy Dissertation Fellowship, a Hedgebrook Writing Residency, a Baldwin for the Arts Fellowship, a Spring Point Learner Residency, a Highland Leader Fellowship, and an Arthur Vining Davis Aspen Fellowship among others. She earned her doctorate degree from Teachers College, Columbia University, where she served as faculty in the Summer Principals Academy. Dr. Simmons’ research interests include social and emotional learning and its intersection with culturally responsive pedagogy, healing, and justice with the hope of understanding how to foster belonging and collective liberation in K-12 school settings.
Dr. Gholnecsar (Gholdy) Muhammad is a Professor of Literacy, Language, and Culture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has previously served as a classroom teacher, literacy specialist, school district administrator, curriculum director, and school board president. She studies Black historical excellence in education, intending to reframe curriculum and instruction today. Dr. Muhammad’s scholarship has appeared in leading academic journals and books.
Dr. Muhammad has received numerous national awards and is the author of the best-selling book, Cultivating Genius: An Equity Model for Culturally and Historically Responsive Literacy. She also co-authored Black Girls’ Literacies: An Edited Volume. Her Culturally and Historically Responsive Education Model has been adopted across thousands of U.S. schools and districts across Canada. In 2022, 2023, and 2024, she was named among the top 1% Edu-Scholar Public Influencers due to her impact on policy and practice.
Dr. Muhammad has also received numerous awards from national organizations and universities. She has led a federal grant with the United States Department of Education to study culturally and historically responsive literacy in STEM classrooms. Her newest book, Unearthing Joy, is the sequel to Cultivating Genius and provides a practical guide for putting culturally and historically responsive education into curricular practice. In 2025, her first curriculum, entitled Genius, Justice and Joy, will be available to schools and educators.
Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz is a Professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. In May 2024 Yolanda was recognized with the prestigious Dorothy Height Distinguished Alumni Award from New York University. She is co-editor of five books and is co-author of the multiple award-winning book Advancing Racial Literacies in Teacher Education: Activism for Equity in Digital Spaces (2021) where she examines her concept of Archeology of Self ™ in education. Her first full-length collection of poetry, Love from the Vortex & Other Poems, was published in March 2020. Her sophomore book of poetry, The Peace Chronicles, was published in July 2021. Yolanda opened the 2022 TEDx UPENN conference at the University of Pennsylvania with her TEDx Talk: Truth, Love & Racial Literacy. For three years in a row, she was named one of EdWeek’s EduScholar Influencers — a list of the Top 1% of educational scholars in the United States — a highly selective group of 200 scholars (chosen from a pool of 20,000). At Teachers College, she is the founder of the Racial Literacy Project @TC, and the Racial Literacy Roundtables Series, where for 15 years, national scholars, teachers, and students facilitate conversations around race and other issues involving diversity. Yolanda appeared in Spike Lee’s 2 Fists Up: We Gon’ Be Alright (2016), a documentary about the BlackLives Matter movement and the campus protests at Mizzou, and Defining Us, Children at the Crossroads of Change, a documentary about supporting and educating the nation’s Black and Latinx males youth. Connect with Yolanda on Twitter at@RuizSealey and on Instagram at @yolie_sealeyruiz.
