The Real Talk Conference: Bridging Race, Identity, and Community
Plan to attend and make new connections while engaging in powerful conversations that promote understanding, increase empathy, and facilitate change in our community. Experience dynamic keynote speakers and interactive sessions led by NIU's students, faculty, and community members.
Keynote Speakers
Tia Brown McNair
Dr. Tia Brown McNair is the vice president in the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Student Success and executive director for the Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) Campus Centers at the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) in Washington, DC. She oversees both funded projects and AAC&U’s continuing programs on equity, inclusive excellence, high-impact practices and student success. McNair directs AAC&U’s Summer Institutes on High-Impact Practices and Student Success, and TRHT Campus Centers and serves as the project director for several AAC&U initiatives, including the development of a TRHT-focused campus climate toolkit.
Read more about Tia Brown McNair
She is the lead author of From Equity Talk to Equity Walk: Expanding Practitioner Knowledge for Racial Justice in Higher Education (January 2020) and Becoming a Student-Ready College: A New Culture of Leadership for Student Success (July 2016 and August 2022 second edition).
Ainka Jackson
Born in Montgomery, Alabama and raised in Selma, Alabama, Ainka Jackson appreciates that every successful legal and legislative movement required a people movement, and therefore helps organize the community to address racial and economic inequities. She is the founding executive director of the Selma Center for Nonviolence, Truth and Reconciliation, which is committed to bridging divides and building the Beloved Community, and was previously the Metro Guardian ad Litem for the Juvenile Division of the Metro Nashville Public Defender's Office where she represented children who were abused and neglected. She has also been a case manager in the foster care system, a teacher and an adult public defender.
Jackson is a regular presenter at conferences and institutions. She presented on truancy and the school to prison pipeline at the Samuel Dewitt Proctor Institute for Child Advocate Ministry and spoke at the United Nations in Switzerland about economic and racial equity. She has also made presentations at the White House, the Department of Justice and to the National Association of Secretaries of State. Jackson has also been featured in Essence Magazine for her voter mobilization efforts.
Jackson received the first annual In Peace & Freedom Award in 2016 and is a level 3 certified Kingian Nonviolence Conflict Reconciliation trainer. She was instrumental in Selma being chosen as one of 14 sites for the Kellogg Foundation’s Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation initiative and she currently leads Selma’s programmatic work for that initiative. She is the co-creator of the Beyond Divide and Conquer: Unite and Build Racial Equity Training, which explores how the social construct of race was created to divide and conquer (especially poor whites and people of color). Using first-person historical narratives, the training questions the cost of racism for people of color and white people and how we can resist divide and conquer and unite and build. Jackson is a special advisor for the ABA Commission for Homelessness and Poverty, special counsel to the ABA Civil Rights and Social Justice Section, as well as a W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Leadership Network Class Two Fellow and Telos Group board member.
Jackson is the creator and editor of the Selma Superheroes Children’s Book Series that shares the history of Selma’s foot soldiers and encourages youth to be Selma 2.0 Solutionaries. Jackson is a graduate of Spelman College and Vanderbilt Law School. She has three beautiful, brilliant, benevolent children. She speaks these descriptions to children she encounters.
Featured Speakers
LaVonya Bennett
Dr. LaVonya Bennett is a counseling psychologist. She attended the University of Oklahoma where she obtained her bachelor’s in psychology with a minor in African and African American studies, master’s in human relations with a counseling emphasis, and doctorate in counseling psychology. Dr. Bennett completed an LGBTQ+ psychology residency at the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center – the largest medical facility in the nation. Her areas of research center intersectionality is psychology, identity, and trauma/anxiety among marginalized and oppressed communities. Specifically, her published and in progress research has been on LGBTQ+ equity, police brutality and trauma responses, insidious trauma and race-based traumatic stress, white fragility and complacency, and healing spaces for women.
Read more about LaVonya Bennett
Dr. Bennett has been the recipient of several grants that focus on improving mental health care for BIPOC LGBTQ+ folx using acceptance and value-based therapies. Her clinical expertise parallels her scholarly endeavors. Clinically, Dr. Bennett’s areas of expertise include affirmative therapies for LGBTQ+ and racially marginalized individuals, interventions for race-based traumatic stress, anxiety, and trauma. Dr. Bennett is equally committed to education. She has hosted countless nationwide trainings, seminars, and keynote addresses. Her commitment to education and equity is evident through her teaching, as she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses pertaining to issues of justice and equity for almost a decade. Recently, she was awarded the Commitment to Diversity award from Baylor College of Medicine where she was an assistant professor.
Dr. Bennett’s dedication to dismantling systems of oppression is evidenced through her community work with survivors of gender-based violence where she was awarded ‘Advocate of the Year’ for her work survivors of gender based violence and intimate partner violence. She was awarded the Robert D. Lemon Social Justice award for her campus activism, community outreach, social justice related publications, and national work addressing concerns of equity.
In her free time, Dr. Bennett loves all things trap - trap music, trap yoga, trap karaoke, and trap chess. Yes, trap chess. She also enjoys beach vacations, marathon naps, and sudoku puzzles.
Michelle Donahoe
Michelle Donahoe is the Executive Director at the DeKalb County History Center. She has a B.A. in History and an M.A. in Public History from Loyola University, Chicago.
Working with the Ellwood House Museum, they created Arts in Action in 2020 - an initial step in the commitment to shifting the local history narrative from a predominantly white experience to a more inclusive and accurate account. The two institutions developed Arts in Action to convey history meaningfully, support artists, and invite analytical discussion. They convened a committee of key stakeholders to ensure that the project combining artist commissions and local history would incorporate diverse views.
Read more about Michelle Donahoe
Donahoe and representatives from the Ellwood House Museum led discussions about Arts in Action at the American Association of State and Local History’s national conference, and at the Illinois Association of Museum’s annual meeting. The project also received an award of Superior Achievement (the highest award) from the Illinois Association of Museums for special projects.
Caleb Stephens
Dr. Caleb Stephens is a licensed master social worker and licensed master addiction counselor. He earned his bachelor of social work degree from Bethel College in 2011, his master of social welfare degree from the University of Kansas in 2014, and his doctor of philosophy degree in performance studies from the University of Kansas in 2021.
He has worked in child welfare, addictions, schools, psychiatric residential treatment facilities, with incarcerated individuals and has been a community organizer and activist for the last 10 years. His research areas are the Black narrative, safety, hope, empowerment, intentionality and authenticity. He is a student of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s Intersectionality and applies it in all aspects of his life.
Read more about Caleb Stephens
As a social worker, Stephens is tasked with meeting people where they're at. As an intersectional clinician, he is tasked with putting into practice the understanding of the ways different intersecting pieces of identity come together to create the lens that people experience and navigate through the world. With that understanding comes the realities that occur as a result of those identities.
His teaching philosophy as well as his praxis as a clinician is to meet people where they're at, to empower their voice and to help them create authentic and informed identity and truth. He believes in a multi-faceted approach to educating and learning, as people have different learning styles, processing capabilities, and things that work best for them. He believes in tough conversations, tenderness and intentionality and that people deserve to be able to express their needs. I believe people should be provided with the resources and tools equitably. His teaching philosophy lives actively to create a naturally therapeutic environment where people feel rooted, grounded and able to do the work necessary to live their best life.