Meet the Team
Zahida Sherman (she/her)
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Zahida builds organizational culture for high performance and teamwork.
Zahida is the inaugural Director of Culture & Belonging at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and Lecturer in Antiracism at the David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University. With 14+ years of experience in higher education and the legal field, she empowers others to purposeful and collaborative environments.
Zahida holds a master’s in African history from Northwestern University, and a bachelor’s from Ithaca College, with majors in Africana Studies [self-designed] and anthropology. She also writes about culture and wellness. You can find Zahida’s words in Globe & Mail, Bustle, Healthline, and Well and Good, among others.
In her personal time, you can find Zahida engrossed in poetry, dystopian novels, dancing with her nieces, or experimenting with a new recipe in the kitchen. She is working on her vinyl collection.
Truth Hunter (she/her)
Facilitator
Truth Hunter was born and raised in Oakland, California. In 2003, she journeyed to South Hadley, Massachusetts to attend Mount Holyoke College. She studied Critical Social Thought with a concentration in post-colonial studies. Within this field, she examined how people of African descent reinvent their identities in the aftermath of enslavement and colonialism. After graduating, she pursued a career in educational advocacy and worked directly with low-income youth who would be the first in their families to pursue higher education.
To take her work to the next level, Truth studied Higher Education and Student Affairs at the University of Connecticut. While there, she researched how first-generation students develop resilience to successfully reach their educational goals. Truth continued her advocacy for underrepresented populations by serving in the role of Director of Race and Ethnicity Programs at Connecticut College.
Over the last 10 years, Truth has facilitated numerous social justice workshops for students, staff, and faculty at colleges and universities throughout the Northeast. Currently, Truth is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Educational Leadership at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on racialized notions of intelligence, decolonial autoethnography, equitable classroom practices for faculty, intergroup dialogue, and embodied teaching and learning.
Monique Jernigan (she/her)
Coach
Monique will meet you where you are, listen, innovate, and execute.
Monique is a dynamic executive with 15 years of proven success in the educational service sector driving change across public and private organizations. Through mission-driven, business-savvy, and transformational leadership, she influences organizational change, leads talent initiatives, cultivates positive workplace culture, promotes trust, and accountability. Monique leveraging data-driven insights and trends to plan, execute, monitor and deliver talent-centered outcomes.
Monique specializes in equity and belonging initiatives, strategic planning and implementation, adult learning and development programs, internal pipeline development initiatives, program design, coaching, inclusion programming and keynotes. She earned her M.S. in student affairs from Indiana State University and her B.S. in general studies from Indiana University Bloomington.
Janae Peters (she/her)
Coach & Facilitator
Janae is a mission driven and values-oriented educator and clinician who works with high school students as the dean of students at the Mastery School of Hawken. She also works with graduate school clinical social work students as an adjunct instructor and community engagement and student support director at the Smith College School for Social Work, and as a consultant and facilitator at Think Again Training and Consulting.
Janae’s past work includes crisis services, outpatient individual therapy, group therapy, teaching first generation undergraduate students in a bridge program, and supporting personal and professional leadership development through executive coaching.
Janae is always asking questions of herself, those around her, and the systems and structures of the world with the hopes of contributing to access, opportunity, care, and connection for those who have historically been marginalized. Janae graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature with highest honors from Kenyon College in Gambier, OH, and also earned a Masters in Clinical Social Work from Smith College School for Social Work in Northampton, MA. She makes time for family, golf with her husband Lancelot, volleyball, softball, bass playing, poetry, reading and, most recently, pickleball.