Dr. Mel creates brave spaces for people to have the conversations that change them — and then to do something with what they learned. She spent fifteen years of her childhood living outside the United States as a United Nations baby. That early education in how differently people can see the same world became the foundation of everything that followed.
Over twenty years in education, she has taught children from preschool through high school, founded the nonprofit Creative Community to ignite student voices, coached teachers on culturally relevant pedagogy, designed curriculum,
analyzed statewide data systems, and facilitated equity work with staff and. families. Her international systems change practice includes a National Mental Health Infrastructure Pilot in Liberia. She serves on the board of T2S C.A.R.E.S. She is trained in Cognitive-Based Compassion Training through Emory University and in Somatic Attachment Therapy, and served as an Equity Facilitator Fellow through CREATE. Those practices are not separate from the systems work. They
are what makes it sustainable.
Why this work
Years of facilitating equity, social justice, and anti-racist work in educational and corporate rooms revealed something the strategy documents kept missing: a deep and unmet need for healing.
Motherhood sharpened it. So did the desire to restore hope to people who had been asked to keep going without it.
That is what led her here — to liberating minds, and to building platforms where people can break the systems that bind their truest selves.