Executive Director, The African American Teaching Fellows Program

My name is Tamara Wilkerson Dias and I'm the Executive Director of a nonprofit called African American Teaching Fellows. The mission statement is to recruit, support, develop, and retain a cadre of African American teachers to serve the students in Charlottesville City and Albemarle County Schools. So because the organization is so small, I do just about everything. I'm the only full-time staff member. I have a part-time Program Director and she works directly with our fellows, so I handle just about everything else from budgeting and finance to fundraising, engaging community partners, organizational and strategic development, vision mapping, all of those things that you really do kind of like you would if you were leading. I'm essentially an entrepreneur doing just about whatever needs to get done at any given time. So my Admin Assistant usually is the person at the office handling the phones, checking our general email. She's kind of like the primary contact within the office. Program Director directly works with fellows, so anything pertaining to them or their training or a need that they have, she handles. And then everything else pretty much would fall under me, but typically 70 percent of the work that I do is building relationships with donors, building relationships with community partners that we can either partner with who have similar missions or who want to support the work that we do. And so within that, they all kind of work together. I like to say that I do the background work to make sure that the mission kind of happens. Sometimes I'll write grants. I'll spend most of my time doing that. Sometimes I'm spending time searching for grants that fit our mission or that we align with a foundation's mission that wants a support. Other times I'm leading with someone from the city or county schools to talk about work that can be done to address our mission. Other times, I might be visiting a fellow while they're in the classroom just to see them in action, to take photos so that I can update donors. I mean really, I think the beauty of the job is that no day is alike and that pretty much I do everything from. We just had an event this past Friday and I do everything from running to Michael's to get event supplies to writing grants for 50 thousand dollars. It really is just all across the board.