Adeola (“Ola”) Whitney believes that all students deserve the opportunity to reach their full potential in school and beyond and that early literacy is a foundational driver of educational equity. Ola brings 20+ years of education leadership experience to the CEO role. Since returning to Reading Partners in the fall of 2020, Ola has led the organization through the development of a new strategic plan, the rollout of an online tutoring platform and several new partnerships, an increase in the size and diversity of the national board, and strengthening the organization’s commitment to race equity, diversity, and inclusion (REDI).
Ola was named one of the Top 100 Influencers in EdTech in the 2023-24 State of EdTech report, and in 2024 she was invited to be part of the highly selective Pahara Fellowship, a community of leaders working to transform and improve public education for all students. Ola rejoined Reading Partners from iMentor where she led the expansion and implementation of the college-success program and managed executive leadership in the Bay Area, Baltimore, Chicago, and New York City. In a prior role at Reading Partners as chief regional operations officer from 2013 – 2016, Ola oversaw 85 percent of the organization while managing over a dozen executive directors across the country. Ola has also held leadership and management roles with Playworks, Kaplan, and McGraw Hill. Ola earned a bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College in English and African-American studies.
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We are thrilled to have you join us today, welcome to ValiantCEO Magazine’s exclusive interview! Let’s start off with a little introduction. Tell our readers a bit about yourself and your company.
Adeola Whitney: I’ve now been working in education for nearly 25 years and over half of that time I have served in nonprofit leadership. I found my way to this space because I very much believe in paying it forward. I’ve had the good fortune of receiving a strong education in my life and I believe that everyone else deserves the same. I am also the mother of three boys, one of whom struggled with reading as a young child, so the mission of Reading Partners to help children become lifelong readers personally resonated with me. I care deeply about educational equity and I know that organizations like Reading Partners are only necessary because of systemic inequities that have for generations disproportionately impacted communities of color and students experiencing economic disadvantages. With that as my core perspective, all of the roles I have held at nonprofit organizations have been centered on my desire to move educational equity forward.
As for Reading Partners, it’s an organization that was founded in 1999 by three community leaders committed to improving equitable access to high-dosage literacy support for children in Menlo Park, CA. Since then, Reading Partners has expanded to 12 metro regions across the country where we work in partnership with communities and under-resourced public schools to address the opportunity gap by providing proven literacy support in the form of twice-weekly one-on-one tutoring. Over our 22-year history, we have provided more than 2.5 million individualized literacy tutoring sessions to more than 70,000 elementary school students. And because of the pandemic, we rapidly innovated our program to be able to provide support to students through our traditional in-person program as well as online, when circumstances require it, through our Reading Partners Connects platform.
If you were in an elevator with Warren Buffett, how would you describe your company, your services or products? What makes your company different from others? What is your company’s biggest strength?
Adeola Whitney: I’d ask him, “If you had one hour once a week that you knew could change the reading trajectory of a child, would you give it?” I would stress that if there was ever a moment when an evidence-based literacy tutoring organization was needed, that moment is now after several years of a pandemic have amplified the educational inequities that are unfortunately part of the American experience for many students from marginalized communities. I would also point out that MacKenzie Scott and her team recently discovered our work and, after conducting thorough due diligence without our knowledge, became the single biggest investor in our mission in over two decades. In terms of differentiators, I would highlight that at Reading Partners we don’t purport to be a panacea, rather we seek to use our expertise, continued learnings, and our ability to inspire a committed network filled with diverse voices, strengths, and perspectives to partner meaningfully with communities. Our biggest strength is our own recognition that we are not a one-size-fits-all solution that does work TO communities or FOR communities, but rather a program that is at its best when implemented in true partnership WITH communities.
One of the ways we ensure that we are the best partners for our communities is by deepening our commitment to race equity, diversity and inclusion (REDI). We have a responsibility to our students and their families to not cause undue harm in our approach. Therefore, it’s essential that we make it a priority to train our staff, AmeriCorps members, volunteers and all those that work with our students to understand unconscious bias and the unbroken history of systemic racism in our country and how that manifests today in our educational systems. We have a responsibility to frame why we do this work and why this work matters in a way that both articulates our vision and values and in a way that can inspire others to modify practices that may unintentionally harm communities of color.
In the past year, what is the greatest business achievement you’d like to celebrate with your team? Please share the details of that success.
Adeola Whitney: As I mentioned previously, in response to the pandemic, Reading Partners rapidly pivoted our in-school community volunteer model to enable online sessions via our Reading Partners Connects program in order to combat the unprecedented disrupted learning of what is often referred to as the ‘COVID Slide’. The digital divide further marginalized families experiencing economic disadvantages, so the systemic inequity confronting young students and their families pre-pandemic has grown in many cases. At the onset of the pandemic, we did everything we could think of to mitigate the impact on students, most notably developing the first incarnation of our online tutoring model. And while that innovation was absolutely essential when school disruptions were the norm, we recognize that it can continue to play a valuable role in helping us live into our mission. Having an online model in addition to our in-person model has in many ways made literacy tutoring more accessible to students and tutors alike, so in the past year we have continued to invest in Reading Partners Connects to make it more user friendly as well as a better product for us to be able to share with partner organizations in order to support exponentially more students in the years to come.
Quiet quitting, The Great Resignation, are an ongoing trend causing many businesses to struggle keeping talent engaged and motivated. Most are leaving because of their boss or their company culture. 82% of people feel unheard, undervalued and misunderstood in the workplace. In your experience, what keeps employees happy? And how are adapting to the current shift we see?
Adeola Whitney: What keeps employees engaged is feeling connected to their work or mission. At Reading Partners, we are fortunate to have a concentration of people who are very passionate about literacy, education, and equity, so there is clearly a lot of self-motivation at play for a lot of our staff. At the same time, people at Reading Partners need to feel that the work they do is moving our communities closer to educational equity because that’s what they signed up for. For the leaders at Reading Partners, it is our job to ensure that our staff can both see the results that we are achieving as well as to have a good understanding of where we are heading. When you sign up to support foundational literacy, you want to know that the organization you work for is getting the job done and has a plan to continue doing so on an even greater scale in the future. That’s fulfilling and energizing. We also want everyone at Reading Partners to view themselves as leaders who are essential to our collective success. When I rejoined the organization in 2020, I shared my leadership story with our entire team, and since then I have made space for countless others at all levels of the organization to do the same. Some people have arrived at Reading Partners from similar career paths while others have had very different prior experiences than their colleagues. That diversity of professional and personal and lived experience is viewed as a strength at Reading Partners and we want people to both recognize and tap into the unique leadership they bring to the organization.
We also recognize that working throughout a pandemic has been tough on everyone in a variety of ways, and we have to have grace with our colleagues. Both as individuals and as an organization, we’ve had a lot to navigate and learn from over the past several years. We recognize that we are not perfect but we can always strive to get better. When someone decides to transition out of Reading Partners, we conduct a thorough exit interview process to learn as much as we can about their overall experience. One of our organizational values is Data Drive Decisions, so we very much believe in collecting insights and holding ourselves accountable.
Here is a two fold question: What is the book that influenced you the most and how? Please share some life lessons you learned. Now what book have you gifted the most and why?
Adeola Whitney: For me it’s actually the same book, We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who is One of my favorite authors. The book itself is based on a TEDx speech that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once delivered. I have gifted this book to so many people in my life. I tend to read several books at the same time, so it can take me a while to read a book in its entirety. We Should All Be Feminists is a short, powerful book, so I know people are going to get through it and experience its core messages. I love the book because it speaks boldly about what it means to be a Nigerian woman as well as what it means to be underrepresented. She writes compellingly about things that many West African women have experienced and felt that cross over to what many Black people in the US, the Caribbean, or other parts of the world feel, and her insights often feel relevant to other inequities as well.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as THE real challenge right now?
Adeola Whitney: As a prior question pointed out, organizations of all types are facing challenges when it comes to securing and retaining talent. Finding the right talent, onboarding them well, keeping them happy, making sure they feel belonging and purpose in their work is more essential now than ever. My belief is that organizations should invest in talent the way they would in a signature product. You don’t just let it sit on a shelf and hope it sells. Rather, you need to stay on top of market trends and make organizational adjustments to ensure success. The pandemic taught us a lot, and particularly that we have to remain agile. We certainly took that to heart from a programmatic perspective, but we also see it being an important learning from a human capital standpoint as well. Businesses that never imagined doing remote work were forced to in many cases. At Reading Partners, we embraced change because we had to in order to continue serving students in the short term, but we also evolved into a different kind of organization in the process. Change can force you to see the world in a different way and sometimes that can be for the better if you’re willing to look for it. I think the flexibility we show to employees, from working remotely to modifying schedules to a range of other examples, demonstrates that Reading Partners is aiming to adapt to the needs of the talented workforce we aim to attract to our mission.
2020-2023 threw a lot of curve balls into businesses on a global scale. Based on the experience gleaned in the past years, how can businesses thrive in 2024? What lessons have you learned and what advice would you share?
Adeola Whitney: As I mentioned previously, we’ve learned that in the midst of a pandemic (or even emerging from one), everyone’s dealing with a lot and the best companies are those that are responsive to individuals’ needs. Speaking openly with employees and seeking to understand their challenges and needs has helped us to implement organizational policies that have been well-received. I’ve also learned the importance of demonstrating that my “open door” policy is not a mere platitude because it gives me a better understanding of where our staff and community is at. My view is that I’ll make the time to meet with people who want to share their perspectives because it’s important.
We also learned that our commitment to students runs deep. When we needed to work creatively and diligently to show up for students during one of the most critical times in our history, we did it without a second thought. Having a growth mindset and constantly optimizing our program to benefit students has always been part of our DNA, but the pandemic really put that to the test and I am so proud of the way our organization responded with unwavering determination. The advice I would share is that when facing business challenges, it’s important to remain centered on your core values and to let those help drive your business decisions.
What does “success” in the year to come mean to you? It could be on a personal or business level, please share your vision.
Adeola Whitney: On a personal level, I am looking forward to continuing to learn and grow as a leader. I’ve been a CEO for two years now and in many ways a CEO can be both an organization’s biggest asset as well as its biggest liability, so I recognize that I have to evolve in order for Reading Partners to be at its best. The organization is different from the one I walked into in October 2020 and so my decisions and perspectives need to adapt accordingly. I want to continue learning and growing and one of the ways I do that is by surrounding myself with people who inspire me. I am fortunate to have no shortage of inspiration and wise counsel at Reading Partners. In the year ahead, I also want to invest in myself both personally and professionally the same way we encourage our staff members to do so. We believe that people bring their best selves to work when they feel personally fulfilled and professionally supported and I’d like to walk the walk.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Adeola Whitney for taking the time to do this interview and share her knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Adeola Whitney or her company, you can do it through her – Linkedin Page
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