Just a few weeks ago, Sharhonda Bossier (Oakes ’05 politics and legal studies) (MA ‘06, education) attended her friend’s 40th birthday bash. A friend she met through UCSC’s Destination Higher Education’s (DHE) student-initiated outreach her senior year of high school almost 25 years ago.
DHE is a program under the Black Student Union (BSU), formerly known as the Afrikan/Black Student Alliance (A/BSA) to offer newly admitted Black students a chance to experience college life at UCSC while in their spring semester of senior year of high school. Now the program works with UCSC’s student-run retention and outreach program engaging education (e2).
Bossier remembered her anxiousness about going to college and feeling lost. The bus ride up from LA with other newly admitted students quelled any worry she had. Little did Bossier know, she was making lifelong friends.
“Having an opportunity through DHE to experience Black student life at Santa Cruz made me feel like I was always going to be seen and supported, and that was the number one reason why I chose Santa Cruz,” Bossier said. “Even though we were a small percentage of the student population, it was very clear that we were encouraged to support and build community with one another.”
That clarity provided Bossier the support and community she needed for her time at UCSC and to get to where she is now, the Chief Executive Officer of Education Leaders of Color (EdLoC). Established as a nonprofit organization in 2016, EdLoC is committed to multi-racial solidarity, and using their diverse network to make sure young people of color have the opportunities and resources to thrive and build generational wealth.
Bossier was the first employee of EdLoC, and in 2020 became CEO. For the last four years, Bossier has deepened EdLoC’s mission of building collective power, driving structural and systemic change, and seeding innovation.
“So many of us are used to working with people who are like us or who do work similar to the work we do, " Bossier said. “But when our members collaborate across those divides–when they serve as a bridge–I know the work we are doing at EdLoC is having an impact.”
Bossier attributes a lot of the success in her work to the community and work she did at UC Santa Cruz.
A few weeks shy of her first year at UC Santa Cruz, the tragic events of 9/11 unfolded, marking a particularly challenging time to be a student of color in the U.S, especially one of very few women of color in the politics and legal studies department. Bossier expected professors in her majors to be stringent and unsympathetic to her values, but she was pleasantly surprised at the reality.
“Overwhelmingly, my professors were completely supportive of me. There were professors who, even if they didn’t share my values or worldview, understood why I might participate in a student walk-out in protest of the war and supported my right to exercise my civil liberties and freedom of speech,” Bossier said. “There was a lot of pressure across the country for people to just fall in line, and that was not the expectation at UCSC.”
As Bossier thrived in her academics, she wanted to pay it back to the programs that brought her to the university. She joined BSU and the Student Union Assembly. Through those, she became connected with other students from organizations like Movimiento Estudiantil Chicanx de Aztlan (MEChA) and the Asian/Pacific Islander Student Alliance (APISA).
In these spaces, she helped plan, what at the time, was the student-initiated outreach weekend. Students from ethnic organizations like A/BSA, APISA, and MEChA worked together to make the weekend a fun and meaningful experience for newly admitted students of color.
“A/BSA had a really strong working relationship with MEChA and APISA. We wanted to show strength in numbers and demonstrate the diversity of Santa Cruz,” Bossier said. “But it was also an important practice for me and helped me in my current role, where I spend a lot of time thinking about how to build and sustain multiracial coalitions.”
Entering college, Bossier thought she wanted to be a lawyer. Almost a year in, her path diverted.
One of her professors from a Vietnam War-focused writing seminar encouraged Bossier to become a writing tutor. As a first-generation student paying her way through school, she took the job.
“It was the single most important experience in making me decide to go into education. Most of the kids coming into the Writing Center were Black and Latino students on academic probation because they couldn’t pass the writing exam,” Bossier said. “Even though these kids played by the rules, they were still having a tough time making it through the university. I felt like that was unfair.”
That’s when Bossier made her pivot. She decided to pursue her Master of Education at UCSC.
She raked up experience working at a local middle school and high school. Once she completed her master’s, she moved to Austin, Texas to teach U.S. Government to high school students.
“A lot of how I learned in Santa Cruz was what we in the K-12 setting call ‘inquiry based learning,’” Bossier said. “I tried to implement that by asking a lot of questions, trying to get students to make sense of the world around them, and show them that a teacher’s role is not to tell you but to help you on your own journey trying to make sense of the world around you.”
Two years into her time in Austin, Bossier moved to New York City. In 2014, Kaya Henderson, the former chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools, invited Bossier to a dinner.
Seventeen education leaders of color at the dinner discussed what they were facing in their positions. They identified the top three issues as feeling isolated as the only people of color in the senior roles at the organizations they worked for; how to approach talking about more social justice, economic, and racial issues and their impacts on K-12 education; and figuring out how to best support each other.
Education Leaders of Color was formed out of this dinner.
Bossier says she’s grateful for the experience she gained at UC Santa Cruz.
“My relationships at Santa Cruz are why I stayed and didn’t drop out. My community kept me there, kept me plugged in, and kept me focused. That has also been true post college,” Bossier said. “It’s wild to think about meeting someone at 16 years old on a college outreach trip and then being at their wedding, or their birthday, or welcoming their children. Those are the things that matter in life.”
