Monroe County has always
been home. Now we're here
to help you build yours.

Before any of this was a career, it was a Saturday morning reading to Kindergartners.

When I was young, I started volunteering through ABENY — the Association of Black Educators of New York — reading to Kindergarten students alongside my late cousin Pearl Jones. Pearl was a retired NYC principal and held a leadership seat on ABENY's board. Watching a five-year-old light up over a story, and watching Pearl's lifetime of work in education up close, planted something in me I didn't fully understand yet.

My mother was a math teacher too — she spent her career in NYC classrooms before retiring as an Assistant Principal. Between her and Pearl, education wasn't a career I chose so much as a language I grew up speaking.

Before any of that, there was Citibank. In 2007, I worked as a bank teller — and I watched clients who couldn't explain their own accounts. They didn't know what their fees were. They'd never thought about investing. There was no financial plan. I started walking them over to personal bankers; I couldn't help noticing that the gap between what people knew and what they needed to know was enormous. That was the first seed of everything that came after.

I started at the NYC Department of Education as a District 75 Paraprofessional — my first seat at the IEP table, working one-on-one with D75 students living under the plans written for them, implementing those supports in real time, every day. Then I went back for my degree and became a math teacher in an ICT (Integrated Co-Teaching) classroom — not a D75 placement, but still centered on the IEP — writing and implementing those plans myself. My second seat at the table. Teaching math to students with such a wide range of needs taught me something I didn't expect: the most important skill you can have is the ability to take something complex and make it genuinely understandable for someone who hasn't had access to it before.

From the classroom, I became a Parent Coordinator at an elementary school — a different kind of work entirely, the liaison between families and the school more broadly: helping families be heard, and helping the relationship between home and school actually work.

I carried all of that into my next chapter — working as a Job Opportunity Specialist inside New York City's Human Resources Administration, navigating the benefits systems that millions of families depend on. There, I kept running into the same thing I'd first noticed at Citibank: families who had never had the chance to build a real budget or set a financial goal of their own. So I started helping them do exactly that — informally, long before it was anyone's job description. The financial coaching practice had two real-world anchors: a bank teller window in 2007, and an HRA desk years later.

From HRA, I moved to the Citywide Council for District 75 — CCD75, one of two District 75–specific roles in my career (the other being my time as a D75 Paraprofessional). The Council is made up of parents of District 75 students, and its mission is advocacy for families navigating the IEP process. My role was administrative: organizing the family meetings, coordinating follow-up calls, formatting the votes and legislative recommendations the Council sent to Congress. My third seat at the table — not implementing the plan, not writing it, but fighting to change the system that produces it.

By then, I had occupied three different seats at the same table — the one helping a student live the plan, the one writing it, and the one fighting to improve the system that produces it — plus a head start on financial coaching that nobody had asked me to do yet. That's not a perspective you can read about. It's one you have to live three times, and notice once, to actually understand. That gap — between what families have access to and what they actually need, on both the education side and the financial side — is exactly what Elevated Strategies LLC is built to close.

In 2017, I founded Mothers On the Move in Brooklyn — a community program built for families who needed financial guidance and didn't know where to look. I ran it while raising my own children. It was built on the same conviction that shapes everything I do: people deserve access to the tools and knowledge that can change their circumstances, regardless of their zip code or their starting point.

In October 2025, I moved back to Monroe County.

Not a business calculation. A homecoming. I knew what the families here needed — and I knew that most of what they needed existed in the institutions I had worked in. The financial coaching, the business consulting, the financial literacy curriculum I built for middle and high school students, the benefits navigation, the IEP advocacy — all of it comes from the same place. Real work, inside real systems, with real people.

Monroe County deserves that.