Kara Bobroff (Dine’/Lakota), a leader and innovator in the education sector, is joining The Difference Engine: An ASU Center for the Future of Equality as a senior non-resident fellow to further the Engine’s mission to build products to combat inequality. Bobroff, a citizen of the Navajo Nation, joins inaugural senior fellow and Peabody award-winner Deborah Clark as the Engine’s second senior non-resident fellow.
She currently serves as an Ashoka Changemaker Fellow. Ashoka pioneered the field of social entrepreneurship more than 35 years ago, and today it continues to build the largest global network of leading social entrepreneurs. Bobroff’s addition to the Engine’s fellowship class marks the beginning of a collaborative effort between The Difference Engine and Ashoka on mutual areas of interest.
“I’ve always been impressed with Ashoka’s ability to find and support some of the world’s greatest social entrepreneurs and Kara is no exception,” Zaffar said. “We are so lucky to have her joining the Engine as a senior fellow in this unique partnership with Ashoka. Our ’Difference Engineers‘ likewise can’t wait to work with her to build community-driven products to preserve Indigenous cultures and languages across the nation.”
During her tenure at the Engine, Kara will focus on researching and bringing attention to the loss of Indigenous languages and Indigenous education by using a community-centered approach to creating innovative solutions that are responsive to and reflect the needs of Indigenous communities.
Dedicated to community-led solutions work, Bobroff founded the Native American Community Academy (NACA), a K-12 award-winning public charter school in Albuquerque, N.M. committed to Native American student success.
She subsequently founded the NACA Inspired Schools Network (NISN) in 2014. As the first school network in the nation focused on improving Native American education, Bobroff used NACA’s success as a model and guide for a comprehensive fellowship and community engagement program. NISN is now a network of schools with a new model of education which
specifically incorporates cultural inclusion, diverse language, and community relationships into the pedagogy.
In NACA-inspired schools, students are encouraged to bring their whole selves to learning rather than separate pieces of their community and personality. This model addresses many of the problems that the traditional education system created within Native and Indigenous communities.
“We want to ensure communities lead the way when it comes to building a better future for kids, families, and communities,” Bobroff said. “To change the trajectory of an unresponsive education system and lack of access to healthy living and culturally responsive learning, we must seek solutions from those most impacted and build our response from the community and move urgently toward solutions that work for our families and communities.”
Bobroff has been recognized with multiple awards for her work and served as a Pahara-Aspen fellow as well as a Broad Academy Educational Leadership fellow. Previously, she served as the first Deputy Secretary of Identity, Equity, and Transformation for the New Mexico Public Education Department and started NACA as an Echoing Green Fellow in 2005 largely informing the work.
To learn more about The Difference Engine, sign up to become a Difference Engineer and stay up to date with the center and its work.