Meet the Team
Our facilitators bring a rare mix of buoyancy, reverence, and joy to this work—grounded by decades of combined experience across education, nonprofit, corporate, and public sectors. Many are former educators, movement builders, and executive leaders who understand how systems function and how they can be transformed. With diverse cultural and professional backgrounds, they know how to meet organizations where they are. They guide teams through courageous conversations and strategic pivots, approaching each moment with care and clarity to support lasting, meaningful results.
The work should never feel heavier than we can carry together.
Cardozie Jones, CEO & Founder
Cardozie Jones began his career as a teacher and school administrator in New York City. From the start, he was passionate about learning, leadership, and community—and just as importantly, about making sure the work felt meaningful and alive. As he deepened his understanding of how systems shape opportunities, he saw firsthand how even well-intentioned structures could create barriers, particularly for students from historically marginalized communities. That realization didn’t just challenge him—it motivated him.
Over the next two decades, Cardozie built a career that blended education, strategy, and creativity, helping organizations find real, practical ways to become stronger, more inclusive, and more effective. In 2018, Cardozie founded True North as both a reflection of what he had learned and a space to keep learning. He believes that leadership—real, human-centered leadership—requires both reverence and levity.
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His work is serious, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously. Whether he’s working with grassroots organizers or senior executives at a multinational corporation, his approach is the same: joyful, buoyant, and deeply committed to helping people do their best work together.
Erin Dunlevy, VP & Consultant
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Erin Dunlevy is an equity consultant and DEI executive coach with over 20 years of professional experience in the U.S. and Latin America. She currently works on projects around the country training leaders and stakeholders from corporations, nonprofits and learning institutions interested in furthering their equity journey. Entirely committed to the possibilities that equity, diversity and interdependence create in our professional spaces, Erin believes that organizational change comes from within, and leverages a background in restorative justice to create expansive systems change and true community accountability. She has written and presented extensively about evaluative measures for restorative practices in institutions cited for racial disproportionality. Currently, Erin is Vice President at True North EDI, is an adjunct professor at Columbia University and a visiting professor at the United Nations Mandated University for Peace and works as an executive coach and equity consultant nation-wide.
Zulla Getahun, Director of Partnerships and Development
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Zulla Getahun, Director of Partnerships, brings over 18 years of invaluable experience in her current role. She plays a pivotal position in defining, implementing, and optimizing engagement and retention strategies to enhance organizational performance and support partnerships, serving as a bridge between leadership, clients and facilitators. Her track record includes successfully establishing a thriving learning department for a leading New York City brokerage firm and one of the largest affiliate businesses. With a strong background in Learning & Development, employee engagement, and workplace culture, Zulla thrives in building collaborative, empowered teams and fostering inclusive workplace cultures through communication skills that promote sharing, learning, and curiosity.
Alexa Bishop, Operations Manager
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Alexa (she/her) is an experienced Operations Manager who excels at supporting individuals and organizations. With a results-oriented approach, she manages complex projects, coordinates schedules, and ensures efficient business operations. Her diverse experience spans process engineering, DEI consulting, theatrical entertainment, and personal development. Alexa prioritizes a supportive work environment and believes in valuing people above all else.
Soma Okoye, Digital Media Manager
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Sọma (she/they) is an artist, creative strategist, and digital marketing specialist dedicated to expanding cultural dialogues and nurturing creative communities. With a focus on leveraging digital platforms for positive change, she has played key roles on HBOMax’s Multicultural Marketing team, at Broadway Advocacy Coalition, and is excited to be bringing her expertise to True North EDI. She is deeply invested in leveraging digital platforms for meaningful impact.
Cathleen M. Antoine-Abiala, Consultant
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Cathleen (she/her) is a Haitian-American woman and a global citizen. As an equity coach and multi-faceted creator she is deeply invested in the ways communities and organizations can create new and more liberated ways of being.
Jonny Altrogge, Consultant
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Jonny (he/him) is a Brooklyn based coach and consultant who is passionate about liberatory education and systems change through policy and practice reformation. Jonny believes that organizational advancement and achievement begins first with understanding the self, and reflecting and focusing on ways in which we can grow as individuals to better impact the collective. He focuses on cultivating relationships and honoring our wholeness. He is a husband and father to a beautiful little boy.
Purvi Shah, Consultant
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Growing up an immigrant in the U.S. South, Purvi (she/her) experienced being the only brown child in a poor white school – and the impacts of racism, unfair distribution of educational resources, and tracking. As a non-profit consultant, she catalyzes this experience to further transformation towards gender, economic, and racial equity.
Íssa Victoria Guzmán, Consultant
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Íssa (she/her/ella) brings a heart-centered approach to her work supporting organizational health and transformation. In her consulting practice, she partners with individuals and organizations in their work to unlearn and actively dismantle the ways systems of oppression inform interpersonal and organizational practices. She believes authenticity, rigorous self-work and individual wellbeing are necessary conditions for achieving equity and collective liberation. She is committed to supporting the healing and wellness of individuals and groups most impacted by systems of oppression.
Ana Catalina Duque, Consultant
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Ana (she/her/ella) is an educator, facilitator and coach. She works at holding space for change and transformation, leading participants through content while centering healing and community. Ana’s facilitation style is both emergent and strategic. She endeavors to support organizations and individuals in exploring the places which feel the most salient to the collective, while supporting them with content that grounds individuals in historical, personal and reflective understandings of systems and structures of oppression.
Jason Sirois, Consultant
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Jason (he/they) is a strategist, organizer, facilitator and storyteller committed to showing up as a learner while creating opportunities for people of all ages to connect authentically across differences. Jason focuses his work on helping others develop an individual and collective sense of efficacy in creating more equitable environments through self-reflection, on-going learning, and action.
Laura Shmishkiss, Consultant
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Laura (she/her) supports individuals, institutions and communities to engage in practices that support the disruption of and healing from oppression at all levels. As a white, Jewish woman, she has a vested interest in dismantling white supremacy as a foundation to dismantling all other interconnected forms of oppression that live within ourselves and the world. She approaches her work from an intersectional, anti-racist framework and integrates healing-centered approaches that acknowledge the traumatic impacts of systemic oppression. As an equity consultant and as an herbalist, Laura believes that collective liberation is contingent upon restoring a regenerative relationship to our communities, our economies and the land.