Teni Ugbah is the Manager, Recruitment at San Francisco Unified School District.
“What illuminates the power of the Surge Fellowship, for me, is its deep commitment to building up leaders of color who have a desire to transform the landscape of education, and an explicit recognition and naming of the gap in the field where leaders of color are perpetually pushed to the margins – despite having shared identities with the students who are being served. Naming the gap is critical and building the capacity of individual leaders of color within the context of a learning community facilitates the ability to find co-conspirators who are actively interrogating and disrupting inequitable systems that cause harm to our students, sets the stage for institutions to be transformed from within, allows for the experiences and intersections of leaders of color to be affirmed and seen, and ensures that the work is sustained beyond myself and other folks who are invested in this work.”