Nzingha Dugas

Nzingha Dugas is the Executive Director of the Umoja Community Education Foundation (UCEF). Mx. Dugas joined the Umoja Community in June 2019. UCEF operates 71 programs across California’s 116 community college system.

Umoja programs focus on academic engagement, student leadership, professional development and matriculation success for African ancestry students. For counselors and faculty, Umoja supports training and cultural pedagogy in teaching and learning. Additionally, Mx. Dugas’s role includes leading the Foundation’s central office team, the northern and southern statewide region staff and overseeing all operations.

Mostly recently, Nzingha was the founding Director of the Oakland Unified School District’s inaugural African American Female Excellence Initiative (AAFE). The initiative’s focus was to accelerate academic achievement among African American girls and young women in OUSD and address disparities in educational and social outcomes for Black girls and young women from pre-school through high school.

Prior to coming to the Oakland Unified School District, Nzingha was one of the directors in the Multicultural Student Development Offices at the University of California, Berkeley leading the African American Student Development Office from 2005 – 2016. There, her work focused on the retention and matriculation of Black students through academic support, community development, multicultural student coalition building, and social and cultural engagement for undergraduate and graduate students. In 2016, Nzingha worked with students to realize the first ever UC Berkeley African American resource center—The Fannie Lou Hamer Black Resource Center.

In addition to student academic development work, she is a researcher who believes we must be the ones to write and tell our stories. Her primary areas of research include: culture, identity, race and resistance, history, the long-term psychological impact of oppression, political and social movements, and student leadership and academic development. In 2014, Nzingha was awarded a Fulbright research scholarship to examine how Afro-Brazilians use culture as power, post African enslavement.  She is an adjunct professor in Africana Studies at Contra Costa College in San Pablo, and Laney and Merritt Colleges in Oakland, California, teaching courses in Psychology, African American History, Humanities and Relationships. 

Mx. Dugas has an extensive background and understanding of working successfully with our target student population within public institutions on strategic plans for recruitment, retention and matriculation. She brings more than two decades of program assessment, development, and fundraising that will provide the results-driven outcomes Umoja is hoping for. She is a fierce advocate for equity and access and currently holds the position of Co-Chair for the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity (NCORE) in Higher Education Committee where she has served for the past seven years.

For her work and commitment, Mx. Dugas has been earned multiple acknowledgements including a proclamation from the City of Oakland and the City of Berkeley for youth and student development. She has been cited by student leaders, campus departments and universities for uncontested work that serves to create access and opportunities. Mx. Dugas says that her “life’s work has been embedded deeply in making a way for our students where they might not see a way, and to help them recognize and tap into the excellence that already exists within them.