Shared Vision, Shared Leadership: A new era at Learning Equality

I’m thrilled to announce that Learning Equality is transitioning to a co-leadership model, and to share some of this process with you. Since our founding 11 years ago, we’ve been following inclusive, collective leadership and decision-making, and are now taking an important step to more formally embrace this philosophy by expanding the role of Executive Director. As of today, my incredible, long-time colleagues Navya Akkinepally and Lauren Lichtman will be stepping into new roles as Co-Executive Directors. I will be serving alongside them as a Co-Executive Director for a transitionary period, before shifting into a role on the team that will allow me to work more closely on innovations and the development of our technologies once again.

Navya and Lauren have very complementary strengths, experience, and passions that create holistic leadership for our organization, and have strong working relationships with one another and across the team. They both joined Learning Equality more than 7 years ago during a period of rapid growth, and very quickly took on core leadership roles, helping build out our team, strategy, partnerships, programs, and products in ways that were deeply grounded in equity, educator and learner needs, and international development practices. Navya, with experience as a teacher and edtech leader working with low-resource education systems in India, has played a pivotal role in guiding the design of our products and programs, developing our training and impact methodologies, facilitating team growth activities, and leading our vision and Theory of Change development. And Lauren, with deep experience in advocacy, policy, and coalition-building for equitable education across the private and public sector, and an academic background in Peace Education and International Educational Development, has driven our strategic planning, partnerships, and fundraising efforts, while organizing and coordinating large-scale cross-team projects and initiatives. Jointly, with the support of a diverse and deeply skilled team, they are well-positioned to continue driving forward our equity-focused education technology nonprofit.

They will be jointly leading in areas of vision-setting and strategy, organizational development, thought-leadership, fundraising, and Board engagement and growth, with each also individually focusing on their key areas of expertise: Navya continuing to lead on program development and Lauren on partnerships.

Navya: “We are at a key juncture here at Learning Equality, and we have learnt so much from our community over the years and seen the tremendous impact of our offline-first approach. I am incredibly excited to embark on this next phase of our journey and continue to develop programs that can help us collectively realize our vision of learners developing their agency and transforming their communities. It is a privilege to do this work alongside Lauren, whose strategic acumen has directly contributed to the sustainability and development of our organization, and with whom I share a deep friendship as well in my motherhood journey”.

Lauren: “I’m inspired by Learning Equality’s people-first approach to responsible edtech, and its critical role in the overall education ecosystem. I’m motivated to continue to use our unique positionality to best serve communities without the Internet globally. I’m honored to do this work with an incredible team and alongside Navya, who in addition to being a close mom friend and colleague, takes such a thoughtful approach to transforming tech-enabled teaching that elevates our organization’s impact”.

Nathan Gloier: “As one of LE’s founding Board members and current Chair, it gives me great pleasure to express on behalf of the Board our support of this decision. The reasons why this makes sense for Learning Equality and its mission are timely and reflect a great deal of foresight and a continued commitment to equity. We have every confidence in Navya & Lauren to fulfill this role with thoughtful and strategic leadership, and keep our values and community at the center of our work.”

For my role, I’ve always been a passionate builder and tinkerer, and with this expanded capacity focused on our organizational leadership needs, I’m excited to deepen my involvement in driving technical innovations in service of our vision and strategy, such as our work to integrate AI and machine learning to streamline laborious processes and serve key user needs across our products.

While this transition may seem like a big change, it’s really about leaning further into what’s already working well, helping our leadership structures mirror the values we hold as a team, and putting each of us in a position to best leverage our strengths and passions. When we started to consider co-leadership models a couple of years ago, we wanted to make sure it would be a model that not only worked for us as an organization, but more importantly, would be in service of our mission. So like any learning organization, we spent a lot of time learning — through research, planning, coaching, and discussions with our leadership, team, and Board. We also spoke to other organizations with co-leadership, including teams who started out with co-leaders, or who adopted the model later on, about their challenges and lessons learned, as well as the benefits that co-leadership can have — how co-leaders can share the burden and support one another, lean in or step back depending on the situation and their individual strengths/capacity, and also have the space to stay hands on with other areas of work they’re passionate about. We also reflected on how these models aligned with our focus on being adaptive and responsive, centering the needs and voices of our communities, and we see this evolution of our leadership model as an important step in that journey, rather than a destination.

I’m also excited to be making more explicit the shared leadership that has until now been implicit, and putting a spotlight on the tangible contributions Lauren and Navya have been making to Learning Equality and its work. For me personally, they have been “managing up” for years, supporting me in my role as a leader, helping to guide me through difficult decisions and moments for the team, and they have done this because of who they are and their deep commitment to the success of the organization, the team, and the mission. And yet the credit for their hard work has too often accrued to me, through the persistent dynamics that exist within traditional nonprofit structures.

We’re eager to share with you in more detail what co-leadership can look like, and document what we learn, in hopes that it may inspire others in the ways that we have been inspired.

I hope you’ll join me in wishing Lauren and Navya well in their new roles, and stay tuned for more exciting updates in the coming days, with details on our new branding and product releases. It’s a whole new era for Learning Equality!