board of directors

Danita Mason-Hogans is an award-winning oral historian, educator, activist, and cultural strategist whose work brings together public history, education, and community memory. A seventh-generation Chapel Hillian, she draws on her family's deep roots in the community and her longstanding relationship with the University of North Carolina to illuminate difficult, overlooked, and often misunderstood histories of race, education, and social change in the American South.

For more than a decade, Mason-Hogans has worked closely with veterans of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), learning from their organizing traditions and helping document and share their experiences. That work has deeply shaped her own approach: history should not simply tell us what happened—it should help communities understand how change happens. Through oral histories, public programs, youth education, descendant engagement, and collaborative research, she brings Movement history into conversation with the challenges communities face today.

Mason-Hogans is particularly known for creating spaces where people who do not always share the same experiences or perspectives can work together around difficult history. As a relational facilitator, she connects community members, descendants, scholars, students, educators, institutions, and decision-makers in processes rooted in listening, historical understanding, and collaborative problem-solving.

Her work with young people is central to this practice. She helps students connect historical policies and organizing traditions to contemporary questions of education, democracy, race, and opportunity—while preparing them to see themselves not simply as students of history, but as researchers, storytellers, leaders, and makers of change.

Her work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Oral History Association and has included a residency at the National Humanities Center and work with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She has contributed to documentary and film projects, coordinated the 2015 National Voting Rights Conference, delivered a TEDx talk, and served with UNC-Chapel Hill's History, Race, and a Way Forward initiative.

Across all of this work is a simple principle: the people closest to history carry knowledge that institutions need. Mason-Hogans works to ensure that this knowledge is preserved, respected, and brought into the conversations shaping education, public policy, community life, and the future.

Missy Julian-Fox is an educator, author, business owner and experiential designer who, most recently, served as Director of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Visitors' Center and First Look Executive Director, 2008 - 2018, introducing more than 27,000 middle school students across North Carolina to the possibility, pathway, accessibility, experience and benefits of going to college.  A Tar Heel born and bred, she is a Chapel Hill native, literally growing up in her parents’ clothing store, Julian’s, on Franklin Street.  Earning a B.A. degree in English from Carolina and a M.Ed. from Boston University, Missy served as a Title I reading teacher both in Massachusetts and upon her return to Chapel Hill, at Seawell Elementary School, forging a commitment to children, education and access that continues to be her lifelong passion.  

Mike Ogle has been using skills he honed as a journalist, writer, and editor to advance causes for equity and racial justice since 2016. His work on the widely forgotten 1970 murder of James Cates Jr. on the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has helped lead to a re-emergence of Mr. Cates's story, a public re-examination of the circumstances surrounding his death, campaigns to permanently honor Mr. Cates on UNC's campus, and the formation of the James Cates Remembrance Coalition. Mike has served on the Executive Committee of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP and been a member of the Orange County Community Remembrance Coalition, which coordinates with the Equal Justice Initiative. He also founded the online newsletter Stone Walls, which examines undertold local history and connects those narratives to modern inequities. As a journalist, Mike has written for The New York Times, ESPN The Magazine, Sports Illustrated, New York, Washington Post, and News & Observer. Mike's work on Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1960 visit to Chapel Hill and the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation uncovered unseen local racial tensions and previously unknown history, as did his work on the 1898 lynching of Manly McCauley. Mike graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill with a degree in journalism and mass communication and an outside concentration in history.

Bonita Joyce started organizing around community education when she came to the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill as a freshman. She became involved with a group of students interested in creating a community-based program about Black history and culture. In 1992 the group formed the Communiversity Youth Program, a Saturday school aimed to educate, empower and expose youth to different aspects of African American culture and history. Through her involvement with the program, Ms. Joyce learned more about the lack of quality education for Black kids in Chapel Hill. She continued her push to empower local youth after graduating, and accepted a position at Hargraves Community Center running the after school program. Ms. Joyce partnered with Danita Mason-Hogans to run an academic-based after school program aimed at supporting the youth through study help, field trips, and other enrichment. Through the years, she has continued pushing to improve and expand the educational experience for Black kids in Chapel Hill.

Christopher Faison earned his Bachelor of Arts in History and Afro-American Studies and Master of Arts in Teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Chris is currently finishing a Ph.D. in Educational Research and Policy Analysis at North Carolina State University. He has served as an assistant director for federal loans in the Office of Scholarships and Student Aid at UNC-CH. Chris completed a national fellowship with the American Express Leadership Academy at Campaign for Black Male Achievement. Chris has served as the Chairman and Executive Director Observer of the North Carolina State Board of Education.

Alethea Alston is the Executive Director at Holmes Child Care Center offering care and educational experiences in Chapel Hill, NC.  Alethea founded a major recycling program in 1989, in the Ridgefield Community (now South Estes Drive) where she was the community base teacher. educating residents on environmentalism and restoring beauty to their community.  Alethea also led in education and revitalizing of communities in Chapel Hill though founding a Parent Playground Committee to repair playgrounds utilized by Head Start programs. In 1995-1996 Alethea was awarded the National Head Start Teacher of the Year.  Serving as the Parent Ambassador for Grey Culbreth Middle School has been one of her most enjoyable ventures. Alethea serves on the University of North Carolina's Race, History and Way Forward Committee, Greenbridge Holiday Gift Giving. For over two years, Alethea is active in the NAACP'S National Town Hall Meetings with Derrick Johnson addressing a variety of topics including COVID-19, Voting in America, and racism.