Our Team
Trinice McNally (She/Her), M.S - ESOC Founder & Lead, Student Affairs Professional & Creative (ESOC Founder)
Trinice founded ESOC with a background in higher education and organizing praxis through a Black Queer Feminist Lens. For over a decade, she has led DEI, Social Justice infused co-curricular learning experiences & LGBTQ+ Resource Centers at HBCUs on the east coast. She comes to this work as a student of abolition movements and maroon spaces. She currently serves as the founding director of the Center for Diversity, Inclusion & Multicultural Affairs at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC), and is the founding director/CEO of TJM Forward Culture, Education, and Organizing Group, a creative educational consultant agency committed to developing art, program and organizing initiatives that mobilize societal change & transformation.
In 2020 Trinice graduated from Black Organizing for Leadership & Dignity (BOLD) where she began her journey of embodiment practices through generative somatics. Trinice believes in the collective power of harnessing indigenous ancestral lineages, transnational organizing and cultural work to educate, mobilize and inspire change across spaces.
D Tejada (She/They), EdD - ESOC Operations and Assessment Director, Educator, Activist & Strategist
Dr. D Tejada (they/them/Mx.) is a Black, Queer, Nonbinary, LatinX grassroots community organizer turned K-12 educator committed to an Intersectional Black Feminist Abolitionist pedagogy that uses education as a tool to liberate. Their work has spanned higher ed, charter, district, and even juvenile detention where they have served as a teacher, instructional coach, and district-level manager. They have committed to utilizing a whole person approach (adapted from Whole Child Approach) to ensure programming, resources, and supports are designed with the needs of the most marginalized at the center to ensure the whole person is taken care of. They have a doctorate from American University in Education Policy where their research utilized Black Feminist Epistomologies and Queer Theory to examine the conditions K-12 educators need in order to be well.
In addition to their certifications in secondary English language and special education, they hold certifications in mindfulness, mindful eating, nutrition coaching, trauma-responsive education, restorative justice, and conscious leadership.
Breya Johonson (She/Her), M.A - Organizer, Writer, Cohort Political Education Lead
Breya M. Johnson is a Black queer writer and cultural worker. She received her master's in gender studies from GWU and BA from Towson University. Her work looks at radical love, abolition, Black health, and repro justice. She provides political education, curriculum development, training, and more. She runs the IG blog @blackreadingtoheal and is deeply interested in the inner workings of Black women and girls.
Oreoluwa (They/Them)- Teaching Assistant
Oreoluwa weaves storytelling and sharing into the archive. The goal of their work is to invite each viewer to reflect on their own self-perception and how they move through the world. As a priest of African spirituality, specifically of the Ifa and Orisa Isese practice, Oreoluwa is in constant conversation and reflection with their ancestors and spirit guides. With their practice, they work to un-demonize indigenous African spiritual traditions and remind the world that our practices are sacred and are a guide to remembering one's self and destiny. Oreoluwa is a recent Gotham EDU Film And Media Career Development filmmaker fellow and a 2023 Queer | Art Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant Finalist. oreoluwaakinyode.com
Featured Trainers
Since our conception in 2020, ESOC has been committed to collaborating with organizers and practitioners of all disciplines to facilitate our student cohorts. From sessions on direct action, centering, and archiving to Black Transfeminisms, to name a few. Each year, we bring our movement's shining stars to provide hands-on applications, lectures, and experiential experiences for our cohort members. Check out the partners and guest speakers we have invited to teach and facilitate our students over the last three years:
Jonathan Stith (He/Him)
Jonathan Stith is a BOLD national trainer and participated in the first BOLD Cohort in 2012. They currently serve as the National Director for the Alliance for Educational Justice, a national network of intergenerational and youth-led organizations working to end the school-to-prison pipeline. He has over 20 years of experience organizing with youth and community organizations to address injustice in education. Alliance for Educational Justice played a critical role in shaping federal policy on school discipline, ending the access of school police departments to military-grade weapons from the DFA 1033 program and the defense of Niya Kenny and Shakara in the #AssaultAtSpringValley. Last and most importantly, he is a father of three young adults who taught him everything he knows.
Samantha Davis (She/Her)
Samantha is the Founder & Executive Director of the Black Swan Academy. She is an advocate, trainer, and organizer who currently serves on the Black Women & Girls Advocacy Taskforce and the Self Development of People national committee of Presbyterian Church USA. She is also the former field engagement manager for YWCA USA, where she developed a new state-level advocacy initiative, a nationwide get out the vote (GOTV) effort and mobilized over 200 associations to do racial and gender justice work. Her work has been recognized by American University, Pittsburgh Public Schools, Boys & Girls Club of Greater Washington, the National Urban League and most recently among Essence's 219 Woke100.
Bilphena Yahwon (She/Her)
Bilphena Yahwon, a Baltimore based writer, abolitionist and restorative practices practitioner born in Liberia, West Africa. She is the curator of the online library, The Womanist Reader, which is dedicated to archiving free texts from Black women writers across the diaspora. Bilphena’s work uses a womanist approach and centers the needs and well-being of Black women and Black children.
BlackOUT Collective: is a radical full-service direct action organization. They specialize in building organizations’ capacity to execute creative and effective direct actions in service of their organizing and advocacy work. BlackOUT Collective does this by providing personalized direct action training and on-the-ground action support. They see themselves as a “Liberation Lab”- a container for experimentation, deep space visioning, and learning.
Naomi Simmons-Thorne (She/Her)
Naomi Simmons-Thorne is a graduate student and educator. She is currently at the University of South Carolina where she studies teacher instruction, qualitative research, foundations, and philosophy of education. Naomi has served as a Fellow at the Department of Education-funded North Carolina Central University Research Institute For Scholars of Equity as well as the Center For Minority Serving Institutions at the Rutgers Graduate School of Education. She was recently awarded the distinction of becoming the inaugural recipient of the Cheryl A. Wall Prize in Black Women Studies. Between her studies, Naomi is working toward the completion of her first book, The Ontological Problem: Black Racial Ontology and the Politics of Sexual Difference.
Jael Kerandi (She/Her),
Jael Kerandi is a recent Spring 2021 graduate of the University of Minnesota who was the first Black Undergraduate Student Body President and Vice President at the UM. During her matriculation, she served as the Ranking Representative to the Board of Regents and Chair of the Student Representatives to the Board of Regents. Jael is passionate about racial justice and ensuring that our institutions are held accountable to their so-stated values. For her work on policing Jael was honored to be featured on CNN, Teen Vogue, ELLE, MSNBC, MTV, Cosmopolitan, NowThis, and more.
Dr. Brian Kwoba (He/Him)
Dr. Brian Kwoba is an assistant professor of African American history at the University of Memphis. Dr. Kwoba has a history of activism in the Occupy movement as well as movements for LGBT equality, climate justice, Black lives, and world peace. He was a co-founder of the Rhodes Must Fall in Oxford movement to decolonize education, and also co-editor of the movement's anthology Rhodes Must Fall: The Struggle to Decolonize the Racist Heart of Empire. Dr. Kwoba is also currently a scholar in residence at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where he is working on a book on Hubert Henry Harrison, the unsung "father of Harlem radicalism."
Project STAND: is a nation-wide consortium of more than 40 colleges and universities that is creating an online hub to heighten access to digital and analog archival and historical collections documenting student activism. Project STAND is focused on enhancing access to documentation of student groups that represents the concerns of historically marginalized communities.
Savannah Shange (She/Her)
Savannah Shange is an assistant professor of Anthropology at UC Santa Cruz and also serves as principal faculty in Critical Race & Ethnic Studies. Her research interests include gentrification, multiracial coalition, ethnographic ethics, Black femme gender, and abolition. She earned a Ph.D. in Africana Studies and Education from the University of Pennsylvania, a MAT from Tufts University, and a BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU. Her first book, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Anti-Blackness, and Schooling in San Francisco (Duke 2019) is an ethnography of the afterlife of slavery as lived in the Bay Area.
Makia Green (They/Them)
Makia Green, a queer non-binary fat Black liberation organizer with Working Families Party, Harriet’s Dreams, and the chair of the Defund DC Police Coalition, which is comprised of over 35 DC-based organizations. They are also a chair of the Movement 4 Black Lives DC Money Pot. Makia fights to abolish the prison state, end intra-community violence and eliminate wealth inequality by facilitating community dialogues, mutual aid, leading direct actions, and building coalitions centered on Black joy, healing & abolition. Makia has been featured and quoted in The Forge, NY Times, Essence, Washington Post, Al Jazeera, VICE News, The Intercept, The Hill, Mic, The Root, Blavity, Roll Call, BBC, Bustle, WIRED, and the book, Fat Girls in Black Bodies, authored by Joy Cox.
Joella Roberts (She/Her)
Joella Roberts, an immigrant rights organizer with a focus on racial and education justice, an UndocuActivist, and a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient — originally from Trinidad and Tobago. She is the University Program Coordinator at FWD.us and is the first DACA recipient to serve as both the USGA President, Vice-President and Student representative to the board of trustees. Joella also is the founder of Migration Matters on the campus of the University of the District of Columbia, which is the first organization at a HBCU to center undocumented students and is committed to building awareness, education, and advocacy on behalf of ALL migrant communities