Board of Directors
Gerard Robinson is a Fellow of Practice at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia. Prior to his work at the Foundation, Robinson was Executive Director of the Center for Advancing Opportunity (CAO) and a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He also served as Commissioner of Education for the State of Florida and Secretary of Education for the Commonwealth of Virginia. Between 2005 and 2010, Robinson was Director and President of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, which was a Washington, DC-based nonprofit organization that supported parental choice policies empowering low-income and working-class black families. Robinson earned an EdM from Harvard University, a BA from Howard University, and an AA from El Camino Community College. He is married and has three daughters.
Gerard Robinson
Chair
Greg Fairchild is the Dean and CEO, UVA|Northern Virginia. He also serves as Isidore Horween Research Professor of Business Administration, Associate Dean for Washington, D.C. Area Initiatives, and Academic Director of Public Policy and Entrepreneurship at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business. Fairchild serves as an academic director for Darden's Institute for Business in Society (IBiS). He teaches strategic management, entrepreneurship and ethics in Darden's MBA and Executive Education programs. CNN/Fortune and Poets & Quants named Dr. Fairchild one of the “Top Ten Business School Professors in the World” and one of the “50 Best Business School Professors” respectively. Aspen Institute's Center for Business Education recognized Dr. Fairchild for his leadership and risk taking in integrating ethical, environmental and social issues into the MBA curriculum.
In 2007 Dr. Fairchild won a three-year $850,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, which supported his research on business models and public policy issues in the field of community development finance. His multidisciplinary work has been cited by Inc. Magazine, The Economist, National Public Radio (NPR), USA Today, the New York Times and the Washington Post, among others.
In addition to his teaching and research, he is a consultant to corporations, nonprofits and governmental agencies. Dr. Fairchild earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University, his M.B.A. from the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, and his B.S. from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Greg Fairchild, Ph.D.
Cofounder & Vice-Chair
Tierney and her husband Greg Fairchild co-founded Resilience Education in 2013. As Executive Director, she leads the Resilience team by designing and delivering programs and developing partnerships to meet the needs of the individuals Resilience serves. Tierney has dedicated her career to building innovative solutions to address societal challenges. She spent 10 years at United Technologies Corporation (UTC) in human resources and community relations, where she led a corporate philanthropy initiative for CEO George David with the Hartford Public Schools, UTC’s headquarters and designed and implemented a strategic K-12 education reform initiative. Tierney was the founding executive director of the Darden/Curry Partnership for Leaders in Education at the University of Virginia, where she led the design and delivery of a portfolio of executive development programs for educators. At the PLE, Tierney was a pioneer in the field of turnaround leadership, leading the development of turnaround principals for then Governor Mark Warner.
As president of Socratic Solutions, Inc., Tierney consulted with national and regional organizations, state agencies, private foundations, and leading nonprofits around educational leadership challenges. Tierney has extensive media experience, her writing has been published in leading newspapers, and she co-authored The Turnaround Mindset in 2011. For the last decade, in addition to leading Resilience, Tierney has been deeply involved in racial equity at UVA, serving as inaugural chair of the UVA IDEA Fund, where she catalyzed efforts to address UVA’s relationship with slavery and served as chair of the Community Relations Task Force for the President’s Commission on Slavery and the University. She currently serves on the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers Community Engagement Committee and is a member of the President’s Commission on the University in the Age of Segregation. In 2021, she was appointed to the Governor's Board of Workforce Development in Virginia.
Dr. Fairchild earned her Ph.D. in Education Leadership and Policy Studies at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education, her M.B.A. from the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, and her B.A. in English from the University of Pennsylvania.
Tierney Fairchild, Ph.D.
Cofounder & Executive Director
Reginald Dwayne Betts is a poet and lawyer. He is the Founder and CEO of Freedom Reads, an initiative out of the Yale Law School’s Justice Collaboratory to radically transform the access to literature in prisons. For more than twenty-years, he has used his poetry and essays to explore the world of prison and the effects of violence and incarceration on American society. The author of a memoir and three collections of poetry, he has transformed his latest collection of poetry, the American Book Award winning Felon, into a solo theater show that explores the post incarceration experience and lingering consequences of a criminal record through poetry, stories, and engaging with the timeless and transcendental art of papermaking. In 2019, Betts won the National Magazine Award in the Essays and Criticism category for his NY Times Magazine essay that chronicles his journey from prison to becoming a licensed attorney. He is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, been awarded a Radcliffe Fellowship from Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Emerson Fellow at New America, and most recently a Civil Society Fellow at Aspen. Betts holds a J.D. from Yale Law School. His next book, Redaction, co-authored with Titus Kaphar will be published in 2023.
Bryan Eagle has led successful companies in their marketing, strategic planning, and business development efforts for over 25 years. Mr. Eagle began his career as an advertising executive in New York, working on the launch of MCI’s residential phone service. From there he developed brands at a number of companies including The Discovery Channel, Skywire, MultiTech, and Link Labs. He has worked in strategic planning, business plan creation, new business unit creation, traditional marketing, and business development as well as digital marketing and SEO throughout his career. He is currently CEO of Glanris, a climate-tech company that manufactures a patented, sustainable, low-cost biochar from rice hulls for use in water filtration, asphalt, and concrete aggregates and as a soil amendment.
Mr. Eagle holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia and an M.B.A. from Columbia University. Mr. Eagle is active locally in the Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Memphis business communities. He is the founder and past Chairman of Emerge Memphis, an incubator for technology-based companies, and a member of several not-for-profit boards.
Bryan Eagle
Treasurer
Katie Ryan is a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Previously, she served as staff attorney for the Education Law Clinic at Harvard Law School and a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in its Child Advocacy Program. Her areas of focus include special education, school discipline, the impact of trauma on children in schools, and most recently systemic change to support early literacy. Ryan graduated from Dartmouth College in 1987 and earned her law degree from the University of Virginia in 1992. Early in her career, she received an Echoing Green fellowship to develop a child advocacy project in San Diego, worked on education reform issues at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation in New York, and served as deputy counsel for a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, D.C.
Katie Ryan
Advisors
An entrepreneur and visionary for impactful change. Her latest venture, Inclusively, is a professional network transforming the way candidates with disabilities and employers connect. As an advisor to RE, she guides RPC product strategy and partnerships.