Welcome Our New Executive Director Natasha Erskine!

Raise Your Hand Board of Directors is excited to announce that Natasha Erskine is our new Executive Director. Raise Your Hand hired Natasha as our first full-time parent organizer almost four years ago...bringing her on staff was the first step in a vision for investing in the parents closest to the pain in Chicago Public School. Like many parents, Natasha felt forced to organize when she realized that the things happening at her daughter's school wouldn't improve unless parents built a community and pushed back through principled struggle. 

This proven knowledge and experience made Natasha a perfect candidate for our first full-time organizer. In the last four years, Natasha has helped hundreds of parents and school communities organize through and around their Local School Councils (LSCs). Parents across Chicago rely on Natasha's deep understanding of LSC policy and community building. As Natasha has grown into a city-wide organizer, she's helped create and develop Raise Your Hand's equity-focused strategy for organizing in the communities with the most LSC vacancies. Natasha helped hire and build the capacity for LSC Organizers across the city's South and West sides in LSC elections in 2020. 

As we considered the future of Raise Your Hand, we couldn't imagine anyone better suited than Natasha to continue the community organizing work that Jianan focused us around. We look forward to working with Natasha to enact her vision for a loving and organized community of families supporting public education. 

Executive Director Natasha Erskine Honored in Leading RYH Forward.

I am honored to be the incoming Executive Director of Raise Your Hand (RYH) Illinois. This transition from RYH's Local School Council Director feels natural. I bring to this role a deep love for my community, lessons from professional and lived experiences and mentorship from parent leaders, caregivers, youth, and organizers. 

Deeply informed by my K-12 experience in CPS schools across Englewood, Morgan Park, and Pullman neighborhoods and as a CPS mom serving as Chair of LSC, PAC at my daughter's schools. I am prepared to collaborate and lead with parents, youth, and communities to erase structural inequities impacting their children and families in public education.  

With so much currently at stake in public education on a national level, RYH is in a solid position to grow and refine our focus to confront systemic racism & structural disinvestment with real solutions developed by parents. By working to advance racial equity through activating & organizing the next generation of parent activists; I am committed to building upon RYH's legacy in advocacy work, anchoring parents as change agents seeking participatory democracy, transparency, equitable funding, and education. 

With the upcoming elections for Local School Councils (LSCs) in April 2024 and Elected Representative School Board (ERSB) in November 2024, we have such a significant opportunity to shift towards actual equity amid experiencing the broken promises and effects of more than 100 CPS closed and repurposed schools that have destabilized predominantly Black communities, displacing Black students, families, and teachers. In Chicago, we've experienced a persistent legacy of segregation and oppression at the intersections of education, housing, safety, food security, and justice. My vision is to build on RYH's legacy of organizing with parents, focusing on those historically marginalized.  

Raise Your Hand was founded in 2010 during a budget crisis that threatened to increase CPS class size to 37 and has now spent 9 years working to strengthen and protect public education by elevating parent voice. Campaigns on adequate & equitable funding, democratic & transparent school governance, a reduction in standardized testing, appropriate special education services, safeguards for student privacy, and a moratorium on school privatization have involved 1000's of CPS and Illinois parents. Often in coalition with groups from across the city and state, RYH has laid the groundwork for the ideas and solutions that will lead to true systemic change at the CPS district level and throughout the state. 

Stay tuned and join us for RYH’s anticipated LSC election empowerment workshop series to support candidates in the upcoming 2024 elections. A schedule will be released soon – stay connected to our website and follow us on all social media @ILRaiseYourHand. 

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” -Fredrick Douglass

In Solidarity Always,

Natasha

Pronouns: She/Her • Email: natasha@ilraiseyourhand.org