GRACE Learning Village seeks to empower and heal communities of color through education and community care. As an organization, we are committed to dismantling and replacing dehumanizing systems and institutions so that presently oppressed people are able to thrive. We intend to create and maintain various spaces in which young people and caring adults are active participants in their school, local, national, and global communities.
G.R.A.C.E. Learning Village School &
Neighborhood Healing Centres
GRACE Learning Village will implement and manage the GRACE Learning Village School (GLVS) model as well as the accompanying Neighborhood Healing Centres (NHC). GLVSs will consist of PreK through 12th grade educational facilities. The PreK through 12th grade educational program is rooted in Pro-Black Indigenous People of Color(BIPOC), project-based, social justice-focused curricula & pedagogies. The residential housing experience will provide nurturing spaces for youth in foster care as well as for youth whose families desire a more intensive educational experience. NHCs will empower youth and adults within the communities they are located by serving as a hub for the delivery of social services and community development programs.
About Us
Equity Declaration
GRACE Learning Village defines diversity as proportional and equitable representation of (cultural) groups within any given community and its systems and institutions.
Grace Learning Village defines inclusion as full access and participation of proportionally and equitably represented (cultural) groups within any given community and its systems and institutions.
GRACE Learning Village defines equity as fairness in the distribution of power and resources within any given community and its systems and institutions such that all individuals are empowered in ways that support their freedom of mind and body.
As such GRACE Learning Village foregrounds equity within our programs in order to realize a society in which ALL people, particularly the OPPRESSED and MARGINALIZED, are equipped with the skills to assume active roles in strengthening their community, healing our nation, and ultimately transforming the world. It has been our collective professional and lived experience that “diversity” (i.e. proportional representation) and “inclusion” (i.e. full access & participation) can be engendered & enforced without real change in the lived experiences of the oppressed and the privileged. The status quo remains intact and eventually evolves, perpetuating racism, sexism, ableism, heterosexism etc.
Because they tend to be offered as surface level interventions, traditional and conventional diversity trainings don’t go deep enough in their existential ask. Equity work resulting in significant change in behavior and relationships requires focused introspection, guided evaluation and purposeful re-organization of one’s thinking about oneself and one’s actions and one’s understandings and assumptions about others.
As such, GRACE Learning Village believes that in order to engender long-lasting, life-changing, altered behavior, identity work is necessary. By identity work, we mean engaging in meaningful, intentional analysis of “who” an individual and/or organization has been, who they are currently, who they understand others to be and who they want and/or need to be in order to change their behavior in meaningful, intentional ways.
Centralizing anti-racism within an equity narrative nexus (i.e. authentic storytelling) GRACE Learning Village offers educational and community care programming, (e.g. GLV School, Neighborhood Healing Centres, Humanizing Professional Learning, etc.) that facilitates the movement of individuals demonstrating minimal equity awareness and competence toward becoming the empowered BIPOC change agents, “woke” allies and social justice co-conspirators we need to effectively challenge and eventually dismantle systems of oppression and usher in unprecedented economically, socially and politically equitable lived experiences for BIPOC.
Council of Elders
Founding Iyalna (Great Mother) Marini C. Lee has been a daycare assistant, a preschool teacher, an after-school program teacher, a substitute teacher, a residential high school summer program instructor and coordinator, a college professor, a higher education recruiter and an undergraduate retention specialist. In August 2020, in response to the unique pressures the global pandemic applied to the educational system, Dr. Lee decided to pursue her dedication to the liberation of BIPOC by becoming an educational consultant full time, offering youth program creation and coordination services, anti-racist/racial equity training and yoga instruction.
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Kyla Britt Thomas is an independent education consultant and aspiring children’s book author based in Lafayette, Louisiana. Her recent projects have focused on co-constructing culturally relevant understandings and practices among elementary educators, developing and sustaining antiracist practices and policies in the non-profit sector, and cultivating humanizing distance learning pedagogies during a pandemic. Kyla utilizes inquiry as a professional learning tool to support educators in interrogating their beliefs and practices so that they can be more intentional about how their pedagogies impact learners. All of her projects are ultimately grounded in her understanding of the dire need for communal humanization that empowers the disempowered by supporting individual and collective agency as a means of improving the experiences of Black and Indigenous People of Color. Kyla is a former New York City Public School special educator, who earned her master’s degree in special education from The City College of New York and her bachelor’s degree in English from the University of California, Berkeley.
Leigh Graves Wolf is a teacher-scholar and an Assistant Professor in Educational Development at University College Dublin Centre for Teaching & Learning. Her work centers around online education, critical digital pedagogy, K12 teacher professional development and relationships mediated by and with technology. She has worked across the educational spectrum from K12 to Higher to further and lifelong. She believes passionately in collaboration and community.
Jim Garrett is a teacher and researcher at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA. His research explores the emotional demands of teaching and learning, and in particular when that teaching and learning has to do with issues of violence, injustice, suffering, and social upheaval. Based on this research, and in light of the needs of our times, his teaching strives to create conditions where individuals can be challenged to learn within one another in public spaces. His book, Learning to be in the World with Others: Difficult Knowledge and Social Studies Education, was published in 2017. His current projects are aimed at community embedded education efforts that explore the ongoing movement and struggle for civil rights, relying heavily on the models of the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Schools and the Highlander Center for methods of community education. Jim's commitments to notions of community and relation are the framing ideas for his teaching and community work.
Markia Diop is the Administrative Liaison to the Board of Directors and CEO of Orchards Children’s Services. Ms. Diop has worked in many facets of child welfare of the past decade. Making quick calculated decisions in a crisis is a skill Ms. Diop developed in her numerous investigatory positions within child welfare. Ms. Diop earned her Bachelors of Arts in Criminal Justice and a Specialization in Security Management at Michigan
State University.
Ms. Diop has three children, two girls and one boy. When she is not exploring Metro Detroit or other cities across the states with her children, she is diligently building her business. Markia Diop is the Founder of Vendor Ventures, a platform created for small business owners to expand their network and client reach. Ms. Diop is responsible for creating a professional environment for business owners to sell and promote their products and services.
Ms. Sharea Ayers
Community advocate, educator, counselor, entrepreneur, and student are a few titles associated with Sharea Ayers. She attended Renaissance High School and went on to acquire a Bachelor of Science degree from Bowling Green State University and a Master of Arts degree from Michigan State University. Her love for organization and activism started in high school and over the years, Ayers has been able to work with several esteemed individuals and groups that serve the city of Detroit. Now she is a Director of Events and Growth Membership for Black Leaders Detroit; a funding source for small Black-led businesses that operate in the city.