-: 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.