Staff

Sumi was born in Oakland and raised in Richmond and finds passion and strength in her family’s resilience and history; her father grew up sharecropping in Louisiana during the 1930s and her grandparents were sent to internment camps during World War II. She attended K-12 public schools in Richmond and received her B.A. in Black Studies and Global Peace and Security from UC Santa Barbara and a Master’s in Bilingual Multicultural Education from Sacramento State University. She is passionate about educational justice and is committed to making higher education a reality for low-income,...

Tanzania is from East Oakland, CA. She moved to Portland, OR, where she received her Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Lewis and Clark College on a full-ride academic scholarship. In college, Tanzania was a member of the Black Student Union for four years, and of those four years, she was the Black Student Union’s president for one year. While in Portland, she volunteered at high schools in the Portland Metro Area. She realized that her calling was helping low-income students of color get into college during her volunteer work and being a product of a college access program. She saw many...