Alumni Spotlight: Dr. Sharla Horton-Williams, Class of 2020
Dr. Sharla Horton-Williams is an education consultant working as a senior director with The Commit Partnership, the co-founder and managing partner of School Leadership for Social Justice, and the owner of Lifted Consulting.
All of her work has equity at the center. “Equity is about humanity, and I believe that every human should have equal access to opportunity and prosperity,” she shared. ”All of our nation's systems were built to benefit some and exclude others, and the K-12 education system is no exception…Kids that look like me are brilliant, bold, full of light and joy, and have so much to offer the world! All they lack is opportunity.”
In order to help further her impact on our community, Sharla took part in Leadership ISD’s Civic Voices Fellowship in 2019 and 2020. “Civic Voices helped me to see the value and power of collective advocacy and helped me to shift my focus from micro to macro in terms of naming the problem and finding solutions. The problem of educational inequity is not an educator's problem; it's everyone's problem. What I love so much about Civic Voices is that it helps everyone to know the problem and builds our local advocacy ecosystem by engaging people from all backgrounds and roles to do the hard and necessary work of improving education.”
Sharla serves on the board of directors and chairs the advocacy committee for Educational First Steps, a non-profit organization that seeks to increase access to high-quality childcare centers in high-poverty areas reach national accreditation. She also serves on the board of directors and is board secretary for Trinity Metro, the public transit agency serving Fort Worth and partner cities across Tarrant County focused on providing safe, reliable transit services that efficiently move people throughout our region to ensure access to work, entertainment, education, and more.
In addition to loving her work, Sharla loves music, brunch, traveling, time with friends, her church, and living life to the fullest.
