Leadership

I am a budget professional and entrepreneur with over 15 years of budget experience, including grant management. I have worked in local government, higher education, and non-profit sectors. For a decade, I worked at the District of Columbia (DC) Council Budget Office, where I served as a Sr. Budget Analyst overseeing the education budget. In 2010, I left DC Council Budget Office to pursue my passion, to work with students in the DC Public School system. 

My desire to work with students is deeply rooted in my upbringing. Practicing Aikido, a Japanese martial art, provided me with the extraordinary opportunity to visit Japan—a dream I never envisioned while growing up in St. Elizabeth, Jamaica. This transformative experience inspired me to share such opportunities with students in DC Public Schools, especially those in underserved communities. My plan was to teach students Aikido as a tool to instill discipline, build resilience, and encourage them to dream big.

Although my initial efforts had minimal success, this led me to evaluate my plan and identify areas for improvement. During this evaluation process, I read "The Success Principle" by Jack Canfield, which taught me a lot about setting and achieving goals. I realized that I had not established concrete goals to measure my achievements and track my progress towards success. This realization became the impetus for creating student goal-setting planners. Despite the limited reach of my Aikido program, my passion for helping students remained strong, and I recognized the need to pivot. 

I am passionate about ensuring that our student weekly goal-setting planners reach as many students as possible. While I recognize the shift towards electronic planners and calendars in many schools, I strongly believe there is still a significant need for hardcopy planners.