Teresa Cisneros spent years facilitating equity and leadership trainings across the nonprofit sector, and kept seeing the same failure pattern: staff and leadership completed the training, then administration, policy, and the board carried on exactly as before. She started calling it Chequity — check-the-box equity: the performative piece that lets an organization say it did the work without the work ever reaching the system. Inherited Institutional Systems™ grew directly out of watching that pattern repeat across enough institutions to stop looking like an exception.

She’s a founder and Interim Executive Director of Coalición Fortaleza, a women-of-color–led organization serving Latine and Indigenous communities of the Rogue Valley, Oregon — setting strategy and stewarding budgets, partnerships, and programs, not just advising from outside. She was also curriculum lead for Speak/Sing Native™, a Native arts curriculum, and co-creator of its Oregon Department of Education professional development training, and advised Oregon’s state education office on tribal education policy after administering Title VI programming across 90+ tribal affiliations and training 100+ educators.

She is also running for Ashland, OR city council so if you’re curious about that you can see her priorities here: www.Cisneros4Council.com