Stephanie Roberson’s commitment to education and collective liberation has spanned over 20 years. She began her career as a K-12 educator in Clayton, Missouri, coordinating a before and after school program. She then moved on to what became one of her greatest loves: teaching. She began her teaching career as an elementary Spanish teacher, and then moved on to teach middle school English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL). As a teacher, Stephanie began exploring and questioning the interlocking systems that impact the lives of students, families, and educators in her community. She was a union member, a coach, an active volunteer with multiple community organizations, and coordinator of her middle school’s Social Justice club.

After nine years in a classroom, Stephanie shifted her focus more fully toward systems change by pursuing a Master’s Degree in Social Work, with a certificate in Human Services Management. As a newly fledged social worker, she worked as a mental health practitioner with the Office of Refugee Resettlement, providing group and individual counseling with unaccompanied youth and their families as they navigated the US immigration system and coped with the stress and the opportunity of calling a new country home. Within that work, Stephanie had opportunities to build up our state’s suicide assessment and intervention work with Oregon Health Authority, the YouthSAVE program, and a coalition of providers whose research centered on developing assessment and intervention models specific to Black youth.

While supervising the ORR clinical program, Stephanie began working toward the dream of founding a nonprofit with her community. That nonprofit became The UPRISE Collective, a space for communities to strengthen their understanding of the systems impacting their lives, to share ancestral wisdom that moves us toward a praxis of survivance, and to build coalitions across communities and identities. Stephanie’s work as Director of Operations for UPRISE helped her to build skills in program development, budget management, ethical community engagement, people and culture support, and compliance – the building blocks of how nonprofit work is sustained. This experience has allowed Stephanie to share the knowledge she’s gained as an Adjunct Instructor at Portland State University, teaching macro-level, systems-focused content to the School of Social Work’s master’s candidates. In this, her love of teaching is sustained.

Stephanie’s position at Oregon Well-Being Trust is the culmination of many years in education, nonprofit, and social change work. Her work is to engage with partners and stakeholders through relationship building, assessment, and strategic planning to ensure that the Trust’s work remains community driven, equity centered, and responsive to community identified need. That work includes gathering stories from educators across the state through data projects, strengthening internal data practices, creating spaces for educators to build collective well-being practices, building partnerships with statewide providers and policymakers, and coordinating the organization’s communications.

Stephanie is a parent, an avid reader, and a neurospicy woman of color for whom well-being is a constant conversation and a radical practice.