An Interview With Yitzi Weiner
As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.
As a part of this series, we had the pleasure to interview Adrinda Kelly.
Adrinda “Drin” Kelly, a visionary leader and ardent education advocate, is a living testament to the transformative power of exceptional Black educators. As the Founding Executive Director of BE NOLA, Drin orchestrates a groundbreaking nonprofit that champions Black educators and schools in New Orleans, serving 550 educators annually.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?
When I was twelve, I had a crush on a boy, and the two of us got paired on a clay-sculpting project at one of the most racially diverse public schools in New Orleans. We were giggling, thrilled to have an excuse to touch each other’s hands. Our teacher, who was white, was annoyed by all that joy which she coded as “misbehavior,” and she leaned over and said, “you people should have never been allowed in this school.” I had no tools to name what had just happened to me, so I did the only thing I knew how to do — I called her a bitch, and I got sent to the principal’s office. Right then, I decided to transfer to McDonogh 35, the all-Black, blue-ribbon high school in my district.
What #35 gave me I now call “spirit capital” — role models who looked like me and expected me to surpass them, the bone-deep understanding that being Black is not a risk factor, and the message that the point of all my striving wasn’t a degree and a comfortable life, but tools to come back and build up my community.
Years later, watching Katrina devastate my city, I understood that the same force that let my blue-ribbon Black school be named for one of Louisiana’s largest slaveholders was the force that shaped the disaster’s aftermath. I’ve called that force narrative violence ever since. Confronting it became my life’s work.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?
I am helping Ms. Gail Etienne write her memoir — and to understand why that undoes me, you have to know one of the dates I return to constantly in my work: November 14, 1960. That’s the day four six-year-old Black girls walked past screaming mobs of adults to integrate McDonogh 19 and William Frantz Elementary in New Orleans. Ms. Gail was one of them.
I use that date anchor — not “pre- and post-Katrina” — to help people understand our city’s deeper education story, because the reforms we lived through after the storm were only minimally about education. They were about race and power in New Orleans: who gets to control the future of the most revenue-generating city in the state. So imagine what it means that I now sit across from the woman who was that history at six years old. The archival research and the chapters Ms. Gail and I draft together aren’t abstract history — they’re living memory, the very thing I’ve spent my career refusing to let be erased from how we decide where we go from here.
That’s the through-line of my whole life, made flesh: I research the 1811 Slave Revolt and the Cape Town rebellion of 1808 as a master’s student, and I sit with Gail Etienne on a Sunday. Past, present, and future of Black education in one room. It reminds me that this work isn’t abstract. It has faces, and some of them are still here to tell us what they carried, and what it cost.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
In my early publishing days in New York, I volunteered to bring the turkey to our office Thanksgiving potluck. Now, understand: I do not cook. I nearly had a panic attack in the Garden of Eden grocery store three days before the holiday, gathering ingredients for a bird I had no business roasting. But my mother gave me a recipe, and I followed it to the letter — or so I thought. The next morning I carried in the most beautiful golden-brown turkey you have ever seen, pretty proud of myself.
What I did not know is that there’s a little bag of innards tucked inside the cavity that you’re supposed to take out before you cook it. Mine roasted right there with the giblets still inside. Thankfully a colleague who actually knew what she was doing caught it before anyone took a bite. Mortifying.
The lesson I laugh about now: why on earth did I volunteer to bring the turkey when I can’t cook? Classic Drin — nobody can ever accuse me of being afraid to dream big or take a risk! But here’s the real leadership takeaway. Audacity is my gift; it’s also my growth edge. A gorgeous vision with the giblets still inside is undercooked no matter how good it looks. Read the whole recipe. And when you’re in over your head, put the bird down and ask the person who knows how to cook.
Can you describe how you or your organization is making a significant social impact?
BE NOLA exists to ignite the Black Brilliance already in our schools and neighborhoods so Black children thrive. Since 2017, I’ve raised more than $6 million for this work and reinvested millions of it directly into local Black educators, schools, and businesses. Our programs have deeply supported roughly 5% of the Black educators in New Orleans and touched about half of them — through an award-winning fellowship, a national summit that has distributed over $100,000 in educator scholarships, and public research and narrative work.
But the deeper impact is a change in the story. After Katrina, a false narrative — “Black teachers are failing Black children” — was used to strip our community of its public schools and the right to govern them. We’ve spent years replacing that with an asset-based one, codified in our Five Pillars of Black Education: Belonging, High Expectations with Love, Exposure, Legacy, and Rigorous Sight.
Now we’re doing something I’m especially proud of: building our own economic engine so this work can’t be defunded when the political winds turn hostile. Our shift toward earned revenue and community ownership — including New Orleans Black Education History Week this November — is, to me, fugitive pedagogy applied to money. Black educators have always built independent infrastructure to protect the freedom to teach the truth. We’re simply doing it again, for our generation.
Can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
I want to answer this differently, because the individual I keep returning to isn’t one person — it’s an archetype I’ve seen in the lives of dozens of women. She is a Black woman leader in education. She is brilliant, over-credentialed, and endlessly relied upon. She is handed the impossible assignment — the failing school, the crisis nobody else wants — with none of the resources or support to actually turn it around. Researchers call this the “glass cliff,” and I’ve watched New Orleans Black women educators get pushed off it again and again: left holding the bag for problems they inherited, blackballed when they tell the truth, their ideas taken, sanitized, and implemented without credit or compensation, and then quietly erased from the record.
I’ve seen the veteran principal mass-terminated after Katrina who wrote a charter to open her own school and was denied, over and over. I’ve seen the only Black content teacher at her school resign after being passed over for a job she was already doing. I’ve sat with women who described apologizing — apologizing — to the colleague who weaponized her own discomfort against them. In New Orleans, roughly two-thirds of our Black education workforce is Black women, and in a typical pre-pandemic year, hundreds of them left, citing erasure, microaggressions, and burnout. Economist Nina Banks has a name for what they carry: unpaid additional labor.
Now layer on the national moment. Black women’s unemployment climbed to 7.3 percent in 2025 — the highest in years, roughly what White women experienced at the worst of the Great Recession — as federal cuts and the rollback of DEI hit them harder than any other group. As one economist put it, Black women were a warning sign, and we ignored it.
So when you ask about a particular individual we’ve helped, this is who I think of. We have quietly moved Black women out of malignant workplaces and into safer ones. We have paid for crisis counseling for women going through brutal leadership transitions. We have brought real dollars to the table for Black women school leaders. And we have insisted — loudly — on saying their names and correcting the record about their leadership and their impact. We refuse to let them be erased. That, to me, is the whole job: standing in the gap for the women who have spent their lives standing in the gap for everyone else.
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
Yes — and all three come down to treating Black education as an asset to invest in, not a deficit to manage.
First, resource Black education equitably — and repair past harms. The persistent disparity in resources for our schools is a policy choice, not a law of nature. That includes reckoning with the harms Black educators absorbed in every era of major educational change, from Brown v Board of Ed to Katrina. As Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings put it at one of our events, “I’d rather have a strong Plessy than a weak Brown.” Fund the schools our children actually attend.
Second, protect and teach the truth. Stop erasing the history that gives our children their bearings. A child who never learns that the largest slave rebellion in U.S. history happened in their own backyard — inspired by the Haitian Revolution — has been robbed of a birthright. And a nation that refuses to reckon with how slavery, as an economic engine, built the prosperity some of us enjoy today is a nation with a distorted psyche and a broken moral compass.
Third, invest in Black educators — recruitment, pay, retention, and community. The attrition of Black educators, especially Black women, is a slow-motion emergency. Policy tools exist, from scholarship and tax-credit structures to real retention investments. Use them. When Black educators are supported to do their best work, every child in the building benefits.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why?
1. Lead like a midwife, not a hero. My great-grand aunt, Julia Marguerite Mills Shade, was a celebrated Louisiana midwife who safely delivered hundreds of babies. I lead the way she worked — helping birth other people’s visions rather than starring in my own. Power and wisdom are shared. I wish I’d trusted that sooner instead of trying to look like the charismatic leaders who intimidated me early on.
2. Truth needs cover. Being right is not a strategy. Creating space for hard conversations means anticipating the political reaction and preparing the people who protect you before the pushback lands. I learned this the expensive way.
3. Your voice is the work — stop self-editing. For years I over-edited myself in real time, especially with non-specialist audiences, chasing precision instead of connection. Toni Morrison said, “As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.” I wish I’d let myself dream out loud earlier.
4. Communion is greater than unity. That’s bell hooks. You don’t need everyone to agree with you; you need to keep communicating across difference. Coalition doesn’t require flattening what makes us different. This frees me to share space and build with people who don’t share my ideology.
5. Protect your reciprocity. People will see you as a safe harbor and pour their needs into you. Learn to be poured back into. Boundaries aren’t a betrayal of the work — they’re what let you sustain it.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.” — Toni Morrison
I keep it close because imagination is the value that underpins everything I believe about getting to a world that works for everyone. Living under chronic racial stress steals your capacity to dream — and I’ve watched it steal that capacity from children, from communities, from myself.
I find my proof in history. On January 8, 1811, Charles Deslondes led five hundred enslaved men and women down River Road toward New Orleans chanting “Freedom or Death,” aiming not merely to escape bondage but to build a second Black republic modeled on Haiti. Whew — the audacity still gives me chills. That is Afro-futurism two centuries early: the discipline to imagine a world that did not yet exist, and to march toward it anyway.
Morrison’s line reminds me that analysis alone won’t get us free. Before we calculate what’s politically expedient, we have to let ourselves dream about what seems impossible. Only then does the thinking have somewhere worthy to go.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why?
Dr. Ruha Benjamin. She writes about imagination as a discipline — the practice of rehearsing new stories and new ways of being in relation to one another, pushing past what we’re told is possible. That’s the exact muscle I’m trying to build in every aspect of my personal and professional work.
I’d want to talk with her about the classroom as the primary site of world-remaking: what schooling looks like when the goal isn’t sorting children into the “exceptional” and the “disposable,” but equipping all of them to imagine and build a world that works for everyone. I’d bring the 1811 revolutionaries and the Haitian constitution to the table; I suspect she’d bring the future. I’d leave that breakfast with my imagination stretched — which, for me, is the whole point.
If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
I have an image I return to: a photograph of a future self, an “Ancestral Freedom Story Keeper” in the year 2036, standing in a small liberation archive where the shelves are labeled Achive Libète, and a map on the wall traces a single current of resistance from New Orleans to Haiti to Cape Town. That’s the world I’m working toward — one where Black children inherit the audacity of the 1811 revolutionaries as a birthright, where our histories are stewarded by us rather than erased, and where the ethos at the heart of Black education — belonging, community, social justice — is understood as exactly the kind of education that heals a fractured world.
Here’s what I believe with my whole chest: Black education is not just for Black people. It disrupts patterns of domination and extraction while accelerating real academic outcomes — for everyone. When Black educators and Black children in New Orleans are thriving, everyone else is too. A movement that took that seriously wouldn’t just fix schools — it would rebuild our capacity to be in right relationship with ourselves, each other, and the world.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
The best way to walk with us right now is New Orleans Black Education History Week, November 16–20, 2026 — a permanent, community-owned annual observance honoring the legacy, impact, and future of Black education in our city. If you’re a funder, a partner, or simply someone who believes this history deserves to be kept, I’d love for you to be part of it.
You can find all of our work at blackedunola.org, and follow BE NOLA at @blackednola on Instagram, on Facebook and LinkedIn, and on YouTube. And keep an eye out for Sistahs for Life, the memoir I’m writing with Ms. Gail Etienne — one of the little girls who integrated New Orleans’ schools in 1960.
Thank you so much for the time you spent with us. We wish you continued success with your work!
About The Interviewer: Yitzi Weiner is a journalist, author, and the founder & Editor-In-Chief of Authority Magazine. The guiding principle behind all of Authority Magazine’s content is that good stories should be beautiful to heart, mind, and eyes. Yitzi is also the CEO of Authority Magazine’s Thought Leader Incubator, which has guided dozens of leaders to become trusted authorities in their field after becoming syndicated columnists, authors, and media commentators. Yitzi is also the author of five books. At Authority Magazine, Yitzi has conducted or coordinated more than 4000 empowering interviews with prominent Authorities like Shaquille O’Neal, Floyd Mayweather, Kelly Rowland, Bobbi Brown, Daymond John, Lori Greiner, Robert Herjavec, Lindsay Lohan, Cal Ripken Jr., Jillian Michaels, Derek Hough, and the C-Suite executives of companies like eBay, Kroger, American Express, MasterCard, 3M, L’Oréal, Walgreens, Intuit, Virgin, Campbell, Walmart, CVS, Wells Fargo, AT&T, Oracle, ZOOM, Udemy, Samuel Adams Beer, Zappos, Adobe, Capital One, Lockheed Martin, Gallup, Procter & Gamble , Anheuser-Busch, Chipotle, Starbucks, and thousands others. A trained Rabbi, Yitzi is also a dynamic educator, teacher and orator. He currently lives in Maryland with his wife and children. If you are a successful leader in your field, and think you would be a good fit for the Thought leader Incubator, feel free to reach out to Yitzi anytime.
Social Impact Heroes: How Adrinda Kelly Of BE NOLA Is Helping To Change Our World was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.