Lakisha Young
Lakisha Young is Founder & CEO of The Oakland REACH, a parent-power organization that launched in 2016. She knows from her own story that winning in education is par for the course when you already have what you need to win in life — and because of that, everything REACH does is about ensuring every family has what they need to win in life.
Lakisha developed a formula that has guided REACH’s work since day one: Ask families questions. Listen to their aspirations. Build the solutions. Liberate our communities. This formula has produced a mix of groundbreaking programming and advocacy work over the last 6 years, including The Opportunity Ticket, which gives the most vulnerable students higher preference for enrolling in quality schools, and the Literacy for All campaign, which is about empowering the whole family around literacy to truly disrupt systemically poor literacy outcomes in underserved communities.
During the pandemic, Lakisha pioneered one of REACH’s most innovative solutions to date: The Virtual Family Hub, a one-stop shop supporting families’ economic survival and their children’s educational success. The Hub has been featured in local, national, and international media, including Today.com, TIME Magazine, CNN, KQED, BBC News, Univision, The San Francisco Chronicle, and more.
Inspired by the Hub’s success and with families returning to in-person learning, REACH created The Liberator Model to train parents and caregivers in the community to become tutors in some of the lowest-performing Oakland schools. Through this model, REACH is now supporting the training and retention of ~200 tutors, providing high-quality, high-dosage tutoring to 5,500+ students across 38 schools. A study of the model called parents an “untapped pool of talent” and noted they were as effective as teachers in tutoring readers.
Lakisha is a respected national voice on parent power and regularly consults other cities across the country interested in learning more about REACH’s transformative model. She is a Senior Fellow at The Center on Reinventing Public Education and is a regular contributor to their “People in Action” series. In 2023, Lakisha was recognized by KRON4 as the Bay Area’s Remarkable Woman.
