Liza Finkelstein is first and foremost the mother of two, Olivier (15) and Tia (17). Her formative professional years were spent teaching ESL, English and Literacy intervention in Hunter’s Point and the Mission district for SFUSD. She has continued to work toward high quality, equitable education for all by serving, for almost a decade, on the advisory board of New Leaders, a national non-profit that recruits and trains catalytic leaders for transformative change in underserved urban public schools. Liza is deeply committed to education as the fundamental civil right’s issue of our time and has just co-launched FULCRUM (www.fulcrum-oakland.org), an Oakland based education non-profit, focused on disrupting and repairing the ROOT of education inequity for Oakland’s (and all) students by pushing K-12 systems to adopt evidence-based foundational literacy practices for all.