Cheretta Clerkley

I have always wanted to leverage my talents to be able to give back to primarily Black and Brown populations. As a Black female, it's something that's really important to me to be able to represent my community, and so nonprofits gave me the opportunity to do that. I started out my career in marketing and communications, and was fortunate enough to have really good leaders and mentors who always invited me into the rooms that probably I shouldn't have been in, but they encouraged me to leverage my voice and to be able to share my ideas. Through that, I decided to go back to school to get my MBA so that I could learn all the aspects of nonprofit business. After I did that, I was able to start to move into the C-suite. From there, I really loved the opportunity of being able to work on the financial side of the organization, along with the people aspect, to really help people be able to grow and foster their best selves within an organization. I'm really fortunate to work and partner with an amazing female CEO and all-female leadership in the C-suite. I'm mainly responsible for daily operations and keeping the organization running and implementing all of the funding. We have a national conference that goes between Dallas, NOLA, and Washington, D.C., so I travel pretty much to those areas.