About

We are The Black Educator’s National Advisor Council (BENAC) and together we are sourcing and sharing proven practices, strategies, resources, and opportunities for the advancement of Black students, families and communities. With and for the community, we are co-designing strategies that will support schools and districts to reimagine their priorities and intended outcomes for improving Black students’ holistic education.

Mission

To offer specific and sustainable recommendations and strategies for educator development and support, and improving Black students’ academic outcomes and holistic education.

Our Vision

To create a just, sustainable, transformational and liberatory educational community for Black students, families, educators and communities.

Values

We center Black voices, thoughts, perspectives, and experiences, and seek to prioritize and protect the physical and psychological needs of Black people - youth, families, communities and educators.

We believe Black Students are 100% innocent and recognize that systems are the issues, not students.

We recognize Black students, and their families and community members, are geniuses (problem solvers, visionaries, creatives and change agents) and have solutions to educational issues.

We embody what it means to live purposefully in our power. We use an approach recognizing that Black folks have a history that started before enslavement and colonization, and it encompasses a consciousness of victory toward self-determination.

We acknowledge non-Black co-conspirators who work with, for, and in support of, versus over Black folks.

We are open to all possibilities. Our dreams are limitless.

We focus on equity and justice for Black liberation.

Equity

Access to the right resources at the right moment

Targeting resources based on individual students’ needs and circumstances

An intentional effort to acknowledge, address, and dismantle historical and present-day injustices

A commitment to providing access to financial, instructional, and material resources and high-quality opportunities

Source: Remake Learning

Justice

Tangible action, or required outcome, of equity

Not only acts of fairness, but practices that produce participatory, anti-oppressive, anti-racist, and healing experiences

Structuring opportunities that are grounded in worth, dignity, and humanization

Living in a free state in which acts of harm, damage, and the conditions of inequity and inequality have been both repaired and alleviated

Source: Remake Learning

Liberation

A practice where Black folks lean into our power and stand in our truth by not altering or tempering ourselves in the presence of (even subconsciously) whiteness and all forms of marginalization and interlocking matrices of oppression - sexism, misogynoir, heterosexism, ableism, classism, xenophobia, glottobphobia, linguicism, ageism, and etc.

A practice where we choose us. It is a practice because we have been conditioned to do otherwise, so when the urge comes, and it will, we must choose.

An invitation to us, as Black folks, to transform our fear into fuel to show up fully and choose us.

We lean into our individual power for the good of our collective power.

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Learn more about how the Black Education Project came to be with Dr. April Warren-Grice, the Remake Learning Pitt School of Education Dean’s Equity Scholar, and Dr. Valerie Kinloch, President of Johnson C. Smith University.