EdNC. Essential education news. Important stories. Your voice.

Search ednc.org

Listen | Trailblazer Profiles: Celebrating leaders of color in the North Carolina Community College System

and

Share this story

Our republishing policy

EdNC is a nonprofit, online, daily, independent newspaper. All of EdNC’s content is open source and free to republish. Please use the following guidelines when republishing our content.
  • Our content must be republished in full. If your organization uses a paywall, the content must be provided in full for free.
  • Credit our team by including both the author name and EdNC.org in the byline. Example: Alex Granados, EdNC.org.
  • If republishing the story online, please provide a link to EdNC.org or a link to the original article in either the byline or credit line.
  • The original headline of the article must be used. Allowable edits to the content of the piece include changes to meet your publication’s style guide and references to dates (i.e. this week changed to last week). Other edits must be approved by emailing Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected].
  • Photos and other multimedia elements (audio, video, etc.) may not be republished without prior permission. Please email Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected] if you are interested in sharing a multimedia element.
  • If you republish a story, please let us know by emailing Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected].
Please email Hannah Vinueza McClellan at [email protected] if you have any questions. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Canonical tag

Please include the following canonical tag in the <head> of the republished story.

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.ednc.org/listen-trailblazer-profiles-celebrating-leaders-of-color-in-the-north-carolina-community-college-system/">

HTML content

This includes the title, byline, content, and tracking pixel required for republishing this story.

Copy & paste HTML
This story is tagged:
Dr. Audrey J. "A.J." Jaeger and Hilda Pinnix-Ragland. Emily Thomas/EducationNC

In this Awake58 podcast episode, we sat down with Dr. Audrey J. “A.J.” Jaeger to learn more about a special project from the Belk Center for Community College Leadership and Research.

The Trailblazer Profiles project highlights and celebrates the work of Asian, Black, Indigenous, and Latinx leaders in the North Carolina Community College System, specifically focusing on current and former community college presidents.

As Jaeger explains in the episode, the Belk Center believes that by highlighting and documenting the work of executive leaders, they will recenter the conversations around who is recognized as important in the history of the community college system in North Carolina.

The profiles will also highlight the urgency and opportunity for community colleges to develop and hire presidents who reflect the diverse backgrounds and experiences of the students in the communities they serve. The Belk Center hopes the Trailblazer Profiles will inspire support for diversifying the executive leadership pipeline.

Sign up for Awake58, our newsletter on all things community college.

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Jaeger discusses several profiles in the podcast episode. One in particular is that of Hilda Pinnix-Ragland, the first woman and first Black woman to chair the State Board of Community Colleges.

During each interview, Jaeger asked, “What does being a trailblazer mean to you?” Pinnix-Ragland responded:

“If you blaze a trail for yourself alone, you’ve done nothing. If you blaze a trail and widen it for others to walk through, around, under, and you walk beside, then you’ve made progress. But it’s up to each one of us to bring others along, and to ask them to do the same.”

Hilda Pinnix-Ragland, former Chair of the State Board of Community Colleges

Listen to the episode to learn more about the Trailblazer Profiles project, how the stories are being documented, and the Belk Center’s continued work around equity. Jaeger noted this important work is a collective effort of a Belk Center team including Dre’Sha Singleton, Erin O’Quinn, and former staff member, Kenzie Bell.

To view the Belk Center’s Trailblazer Profiles page, click here. And stay tuned to EdNC.org as we republish the Trailblazer Profiles as they are released.