
Dr. Ivory A. Toldson was appointed by President Barack Obama to devise national strategies to sustain and expand federal support to HBCUs, as the executive director of the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities. He is currently on leave from his position as full professor at Howard University. He has also served as senior research analyst for the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. Read more…

Brad Williams is a digital account executive for lin digital and WNCN TV. Brad earned his bachelor of science at the Bryan School of Business at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Brad has nearly three years of experience working on marketing campaigns directly with companies of all industries. Brad is a top producing account executive and works with a vast selection of digital products, keeping up-to-date with the latest technologies. Read more…

Outside of higher education, Ms. Jack spent close to ten years managing marketing initiatives and multi-million dollar campaigns with top international marketing and advertising firms such as JCDecaux and Ogilvy & Mather. Read more…


Dr. Mark David La Branche was appointed the twenty-seventh president of Louisburg College on November 21, 2008 after having served as Senior Vice President at Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama from 2002-2008.
Dr. La Branche’s previous experience includes eighteen years in parish ministryserving a number of churches in the Alabama – West Florida Conference of the United Methodist Church. Before entering the ordained ministry, he spent ten years in the health field, eight of those years as a neonatal respiratory therapist. He was elected to the Montgomery County, Alabama, Board of Education in November 2000 and chosen by the Board to be its Chair in January 2005.Read more…

Jeffrey A. Robinson, Ph.D. is an award winning business school professor, international speaker and entrepreneur. Since 2008, he has been a leading faculty member at Rutgers Business School where he is an associate professor of management and entrepreneurship and the Academic Director of The Center for Urban Entrepreneurship & Economic Development. The Center is a unique interdisciplinary venue for innovative thinking and research on entrepreneurial activity and economic development in urban environments. Read more…

Dr. Tashni Dubroy currently serves as the President-Elect of Shaw University. Before her election, she served as Shaw’s special assistant to the president for process optimization and department chair and associate professor of Chemistry in Shaw’s Natural Sciences and Mathematics Department. Dr. Dubroy is a proud alumnus of Shaw University, where she graduated summa cum laude with a B.S degree in Chemistry. Read more…

Michael J. Sorrell is the 34th President of Paul Quinn College. Under his leadership, the school has become one of the most innovative small colleges in America and is rapidly becoming a model for urban higher education by focusing on academic rigor, experiential learning, and entrepreneurship. Read more…


Andrea Ferguson (please, call her Andi) is Founder and President of AndiSites Inc., an award-winning full-service web design and development agency based in Chapel Hill, NC. Since 2008 AndiSites has created hundreds of websites, including highly successful projects for Jackson State University, NC State University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Craven Community College. With a focus on WordPress and mobile-responsiveness, AndiSites websites are built to be friendly to users, administrators, search engines, and budgets. Read more…


Valonda is the host of My Carolina Today on NBC’s WNCN-TV. She graduated cum laude from Winston-Salem State University before beginning her media career. Valonda was part of a team that won the prestigious Edward R. Murrow award for their reporting during Hurricane Floyd. Valonda’s public service work includes mentoring middle school girls, serving as a volunteer cheerleading coach (she cheered professionally for the Washington Redskins) and helping with fundraisers. Read more…

David Hoard has over 30 years of experiences within collegial and nonprofit institutional advancement settings. He has been a leader as a vice president at four universities, both public and private, and has held a leadership role with a system of public universities. Mr. Hoard has also consulted with over 25 other universities and non-profits. He is currently consulting with Central State University.
He is known for his creativity and resource development models in addition to traditional fundraising and marketing programs. In his role at Jackson State University, Mr. Hoard’s results included six straight semesters of enrollment growth and increases in alumni giving, pushing overall fundraising and alumni support to all time high levels. Read more…