BOARD OF DIRECTORS
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Ms. Greycloud was a founding Board Member of the Urban Indian Child Resource Center (now AICRC), involved since its inception in 1974. She has served in every position as an Officer of the board at one time or another over the years. She is a retired RN who formerly worked at the San Francisco Children’s Hospital, Pediatric Unit. Ms. Greycloud’s involvement in the community includes affiliations with the California Urban Indian Health Board, the Native American Health Clinic in San Francisco, the California Board of Registered Nurses Consumer Affairs in Sacramento, and Calvary Presbyterian Church in San Francisco as Ruling Elder. |
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Ms. La Framboise taught in Washington and California elementary schools since 1962. She was involved in the Mt. Diablo Education Association’s Bargaining Team and served as President. Her involvement in the California Teachers Association includes membership in the State Council of Education, Mt. Diablo Delegate, Migrant Education Task Force, Minority Affairs Committee, Urban Training Conference Presenter, Association for Better Citizenship Committee, and Representative to the National Indian Education Association Conference. She has been involved in the National Education Association as a delegate and has been a member of the American Indian/Alaskan Native Caucus as well as the Congressional Contact Team. Ms. La Framboise has many years of training experience through the CTA/NEA and served as AICRC’s Board Chairperson in 1996, 1997 and present. |
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(Chiricahua Apache/Raramuri) - Former Executive Director of the Civic Engagement Project for Children & Families As the Executive Director of the Civic Engagement Project for Children & Families, Ms. Rodríguez de La Mar is working with California State Children & Families Commissions across the state to steer public funds into public policy benefiting children and families. Previously she was the Executive Director of Indigenous Nations: Child & Family Agency (DBA), Bay Area American Indian Council-Inc., managing comprehensive social services for urban and tribal American Indian families and children. Over the past 18 years she has worked with local, national and international social-change organizations and extensively with American Indian, Native Pacific Islander, and Chicano/Latino communities. Her consulting, training and work-experience includes: organizational and community-based development and capacity-building; university teaching; conflict resolution, teambuilding and facilitation in communities, schools (k-12), tribes, prisons, and for agencies. She works extensively in culturally-based Prevention/Intervention models and practices, and has in-depth experience designing and managing a wide array of culturally-based youth and family public policy, social service, health, and educational agencies and programs. These include community, family and youth violence prevention; addiction and substance abuse prevention and intervention; and designing working "alternatives" to incarceration. |
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Heather graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a B.A. in Rhetoric and a JD from Boalt Hall School of Law where she focused on Federal Indian law and equal opportunity. Heather currently heads a consulting agency that specializes in non-profit management and programming. She continues to do research on equal opportunity. Heather was in the California foster care system throughout high school. |
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Ms. Goldenberg has primarily worked in local and state government in Oregon and California since 1990 including employment services, child welfare, mental health, and law enforcement. She attended the University of Oregon and served as the Director of the Native American Student Union (NASU), represented the University of Oregon as a delegate to Washington D.C. in both 1999 and 2000, served on many University President committees and boards serving the Indigenous and multi-cultural communities, and graduated with a B.A. in Sociology, with honors and accolades, in 2000. She then moved on to the University of California, Berkeley to obtain her Masters in Social Welfare Degree. Her first internship as a graduate student was with AICRC, working as a Foster Care Social Worker, and she continued to work with AICRC through that first summer until she was placed in her second-year internship in Sacramento as a Child Welfare Social Worker. After completing her M.S.W. degree, Ms. Goldenberg worked in two Bay Area counties as a Child Welfare Social Worker. During her time as a Child Welfare Social Worker, she provided Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) training and information to other Child Welfare workers. She currently works as a Public Policy Analyst, and serves as a liaison to a local Tribal TANF program, and is connected to her Tlingit/Haida community here in the San Francisco Bay Area. |
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Kelly is an American Indian graduate student in school psychology; she has dedicated the last 4 years of school studying the factors that influence the educational achievement of American Indian students. In conjunction with an American Indian professor at Stanford, Kelly traveled to Native communities in attempts to develop studies and implement curriculum to help improve the academic achievement and social outcomes of Native students. Kelly has professional commitment to understanding why American Indian students are the lowest achieving minority group in the country and a deep personal commitment to helping develop solutions to ameliorate the tremendous achievement gap. Kelly is familiar with a number of Native communities and understands that American Indian children face some unique issues that influence their success in school. In her research and personal experience, Kelly came to recognize that for many Native youth, the lack of connection between their home and school cultures is a factor that contributes to their problems in school. Extant literature suggests that when an individual feels alienated from their home culture or their school’s culture, they are less likely to excel in school. Research also suggests that groups such as American Indians who have been historically marginalized by the contemporary educational system are at risk for disengaging in school because of an overall lack of trust in the system. Kelly is a valuable resource for the American Indian Child Resource Center, especially the Indian Education Center. Kelly believes in the Indian Education Center’s commitment to helping create a haven for urban American Indian youth to congregate and connect to their culture. By providing a space for Native students to meet with one another and participate in cultural activities, the AICRC is taking a big first step toward helping AI students stay connected to their culture. Further, providing this connection helps to ground and empower youth to achieve in many aspects of their lives. As a board member, Kelly is committed to continuing the AICRC’s work on trying to find a way for successes in the after school program to generalize into successes in school. Kelly will lend her knowledge of the field of American Indian identity and education to inform the AICRC’s research endeavors and program development. |
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Arlando is a Native American Liaison with the California Department of Transportation. Arlando is proud of his strong cultural ties to the Navajo Reservation where he was born. Arlando believes strongly in bridging American Indian culture and youth development programming for American Indian youth. He believes that his strong cultural ties were a strength and asset to him and enabled him to achieve his success as an American Indian professional. His desire to serve on the American Indian Child Resource Center Board of Directors emanates from this belief and his desire to support American Indian youth in their transition to healthy, culturally-supported, successful, young adults. Arlando was raised on the Navajo Nation in a single parent household, alongside traditional grandparents, one of whom was a Navajo Code Talker. In his youth, he participated in traditional ceremonies, such as the Enemy Way Ceremony and in the Native American Church. His mother is a social worker who has influenced his commitment of servicing native youth, as well as maintaining his positive self-identity. His mother’s profession as a social worker is another strong link Arlando feels with the work of AICRC, as he knows how important the work of social workers is to the American Indian community. |
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Elnora Webb has enjoyed a 30-year career as an educator including three years as a Dean of Instruction and nearly two years as a Vice President of Instruction at Laney College in Oakland, California. She has served in a range of instructional, student services, research, and administrative roles within all systems of higher education in California. Those institutions included the University of California at Riverside and at Berkeley, the California State University at Sonoma, Stanford University, the Contra Costa Colleges, and the Peralta Community College District. Having affected the lives of thousands of individuals, Vice President Webb maintains the highest priority for equity for access and excellence especially for persons who have historically been locked out of (or disconnected from) sound educational resources. Firmly, she believes that high quality education is the most efficient means to assure transformation of lives, families, communities, and the society-at-large in sustainable and healthy ways. Driven by a vision of interdependence—collective responsibility for improving the overall health of communities, she works tirelessly to improve opportunities for diverse groups of learners. Her commitment to student-centered teaching for learning was reinforced during her 1990s research on teaching, which led to her contributions in Honored by Invisible: Teaching in Community Colleges (Grubb et al, 1999) and to her dissertation, Governance Networks and Their Influence on Teaching in Community Colleges (Webb, 2002).1 In addition, her commitment is evident in her proactive efforts to strengthen instructional practices within community colleges. She has marshaled development of instructional support initiatives including the Laney Basic Skills Learning Collaborative and ensured that Laney College is a partner with the Hewlett Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advance of Teaching’s “Strengthening Pre-collegiate Education in Community Colleges” statewide initiative. She continues to engage in her own learning through direct participation in community-centered, professionally-oriented, and politically-driven initiatives. Currently, she serves on several local and regional boards, and she is active on taskforces to help improve conditions within the City of Oakland. She benefits from her membership in the Futures Leadership Institute of the American Association of Community Colleges and the Women’s Institute of the American Council on Education, and, currently, the Chief Academic Officers’ Institute of the American Council on Education. Always experiencing urges to enhance her capacity, she regularly challenges herself through listening, self-reflection, questioning, readings, critical assessment, pursuit of constructive feedback, and use of other methods. As a member of the last cohort in the Community College Leadership program at U.C. Berkeley, she completed her Ph.D. in Education with emphasis in Higher Education Administration/Policy while also completing all of the coursework in the Organizational Behavior and Industrial Relations Ph.D. program of the Haas School of Business. Her Master’s in Educational Administration was awarded by San Francisco State University, and her undergraduate degree from the University of California at Riverside. |
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Ms. Runninghorse Wells is an elementary school teacher and the Vice Chair of the California Teachers Association American Indian/Alaska Native Caucus and a National Education Union Leader. Ms. Runninghorse Wells obtained her BA in Sociology and a Native American Studies Emphasis from California State University, Humboldt, and a MS in Environmental Science from California State University, Hayward, and a MA in Special Education from Chapman University. Ms. Runninghorse Wells has spent years teaching teachers about the best way to educate American Indian children and to communicate and make connections to the AI/AN families they work with. She has also been active both statewide and nationally in the American Indian/Alaska Native caucus with CTA/NEA. She has made sure that native voices are heard on the most critical issues facing AI/AN students. |
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