R.D. Leyva serves as the Program Director at Latinos for Education where he connects Latinos to professional development opportunities, high-impact roles, and one another. Prior to this role, he served as Director of Diversity and Leadership at Teach For America, where he supported the organization’s corps members and alumni of color across the country. He was responsible for building and developing a strong regional presence of alumni through their involvement with The Collective, Teach For America’s Alumni of Color Association. R.D. helped create regional alumni advisory Collective boards in 32 regions across the country. In addition, R.D. supported national Teach For America initiatives, including corps member and alumni summits and the annual School Leaders of Color Conference hosted by The Collective. He began his professional career as a middle school math teacher in West Philadelphia while earning his teaching certification at The University of Pennsylvania. R.D. is a native Texan and holds a B.S. in Interpersonal Communications from The University of Texas at Austin. He is also an inaugural Pahara-Aspen NextGen Fellow and currently resides in Washington, DC.

Amanda has 25 years of experience in the areas of recruiting, diversity, organization development, change management, strategic planning and Latino community relations. Prior to this, she was the Vice President of Latino Community Partnerships at Teach for America, where she developed relationships with national Latino serving organizations to advance recruitment of Latino teachers and support Latino alumni. Amanda was a Director at The Bridgespan Group where she served as an organizational consultant to youth and education clients in support of their strategic planning efforts. She also spent seven years at Deloitte, an international professional services firm, where she focused on human capital consulting projects and diversity program management for Deloitte staff nationally. Over the course of her professional career, Amanda has been a frequent speaker at conferences and events. She is a blogger on Huffington Post Latino Voices, and has been featured in Poder Magazine’s list of movers and shakers. She currently serves on the KIPP Massachusetts, Achieve Mission, Roxbury Community College boards and the RISE Colorado advisory board. El Planeta named her one of the 100 most influential Hispanics in Massachusetts. Amanda holds an M.S. from Fordham University and lives in the Boston area with her spouse and two children.