Taking Dirk’s Vision Forward
This Frederick Douglass quote graced the signature line of our Co-Founder, Dirk Tillotson: "It is easier to build strong children, than to repair broken men.” Our movement began with him, dedicating his life to that purpose of assuring that every child in America had access to a high quality seat. In 2009, after decades of work from Oakland to Qatar to New Orleans to New York to advance the causes of ignored families, Dirk took an idea to incubate public schools where great ones didn’t exist and evolved it into the organization we have today: one that continues to build and sustain a supply of great schools, but also creates movements that demand a rebuilding of the public school system. From his own words to our loving tribute, read more about the man who is our movement, and consider joining us - as a donor, supporter, founder, leader, teacher, or advocate - into creating the next generation of Dirk Tillotson’s.
Our Supporters
LEDbetter would not exist without the ardent support of our philanthropic partners and clients who achieve their mission by supporting ours.
Since inception, LEDbetter has intentionally composed our organization of women and people of color, representing Black, queer, and Asian communities, and those with immigrant, refugee, rural, and urban life experiences. Our Board fields Black and Hispanic professionals with decades in law and community activism, and other experiences central to schools, community outreach, and organizational development. Deliberately, we have created an anti-racist organization that prioritizes uplifting those with the least privileges, rather than replicating systems that reinforces privilege inequities. Representative authenticity matters, and is the only way to dismantle systemic oppression.
Thus, we often take issue with DEI-B’s use as a corporate tool and construct. We believe that DEI was developed in response to structural racism, sexism, ageism, and cis-heteronormativity in American society, institutions and workplaces. DEI-B seeks to fix the oppressive outputs of an unfair system in ways that satisfy the current cultural consensus on what metrics of fairness are, but does not fully deconstruct the structures of power and oppression that caused inequities in the first place.
By design then, we have flipped our organization structure. Our content and movement creators represent our leadership. They set community-driven priorities, resource investments and assure all we do authentically represents the voices of those we serve, while our team provides critical support to help achieve those objectives. Within LEDbetter, we foster inclusive spaces to plan and execute our work in an environment that celebrates our wins, is supportive and honest, and seeks feedback on our challenges. As we grow, participatory decision making both sets our vision and policy and formalizes our approaches to address unconscious bias and conflicts. Authentic engagement and transparency, to us, helps us fulfill our mission because the communities we represent deserve no less.