Sara Partridge

Founded in 1987 and named for the U.S. Supreme Court’s first African American justice, Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) is the only national organization exclusively representing the Black College community. TMCF’s mission is to ensure student success by promoting educational excellence and preparing the next generation of workforce talent through leadership development. TMCF serves these students and schools by partnering with corporations, government agencies, and similar workplaces. The Leading Edge Fellows will become part of a team building a new Center for Social Justice. The fellows will lead the Center in developing a research platform for engaging scholars at HBCUs in two areas of research: identifying and evaluating programs that set out to bridge the equity gap for the Black community, including ongoing research that seeks to document those gaps; and identifying and proposing changes to public policies that impede opportunities for Black Americans while deconstructing systemic barriers to advancement. The fellows will complete an environmental scan of research by area and categorize it into a publicly available and searchable database, and will write position papers and policy whitepapers on select topics within these research areas.