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SHERMAN, TEXAS—Austin College will host education analyst and advisor Todd Williams of Dallas in a public lecture, “The Role of Collective Impact: Using Data and Community Expertise to Break Down Silos and Solve Our Largest Problems,” at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 27, in Wright Campus Center, Room 231. A reception will follow in the adjacent Johnson Gallery. The event is free and open to the public.
Asil Yassine, an analyst at Commit! and a 2012 graduate of Austin College, also will participate in the presentation.
Highly committed to public education, Williams serves as the founding executive director of Commit!, a non-profit organization that supports efforts to improve college- and career-readiness levels across Dallas County, and is the education policy advisor to Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings. He and his wife, Abby, chair the regional advisory board for Teach for America in Dallas/Fort Worth and helped establish the Williams Preparatory School, a K-12 free tuition public charter school operated by Uplift Education that educates over 1,100 primarily low-income children in northwest Dallas.
Williams is the former chair of the Dallas ISD’s Citizen Budget Review Commission and the former vice chair of the Board of Trustees for Uplift Education, a college-prep-focused public charter school management organization with almost 8,000 students. He is a founding board member and former chairman of the Real Estate Finance and Investment Center at the University of Texas and a former chairman of the Real Estate Council of Dallas, the city’s largest real estate organization.
Prior to dedicating his efforts full time on public education in Dallas, Todd served as both a partner and as global co-head of Goldman Sachs’ real estate private equity investment area, retiring in 2009 following a 20-year career with the firm in their New York, Los Angeles, and Dallas offices.
A Dallas ISD graduate from Bryan Adams High School, Williams graduated from Austin College in 1982 with a degree in economics and went on to earn an M.B.A. with distinction from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in 1989. He is chair of the Austin College Board of Trustees.
Yassine, an analyst at Commit and a native of Plano, first became engaged in public education during a semester abroad in Morocco as a student at Austin College. In Morocco, she worked with USAID and the Ministry of Education to research government-funded boarding schools’ academic effectiveness. Upon returning from her travels, she interned with the Williams Family Foundation to better gauge the state of public education in her own backyard. This preliminary exposure to the variety of educational outcomes in her community prompted her to focus her honors thesis in economics on the demand for preschool in urban Texas counties. She continues to explore how household-level economics impact student achievement in order to better identify trends that explain the wide variance in education outcomes.
Yassine graduated magna cum laude from Austin College with a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science, with honors in economics.
Austin College is a leading national independent liberal arts college located north of Dallas in Sherman, Texas. Founded in 1849, making it the oldest institution of higher education in Texas operating under original charter and name, the College is related by covenant to the Presbyterian Church (USA). Recognized nationally for academic excellence in the areas of international education, pre-professional training, and leadership studies, Austin College is one of 40 schools profiled in Loren Pope’s influential book Colleges That Change Lives.
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