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About the 2007-2008 Alexis Knox Fellows
NAOMI CHRISTINE LEAPHEART
Founder and Director, The MATCHSTICK Group
CEO, MyStory Creative, LLC
Development Manager, The Enterprise Center
A Detroit native, Naomi began her undergraduate career at the University of Pennsylvania studying philosophy and political science. She uncovered her passion for education after teaching part-time during her sophomore year and has since pursued an entrepreneurial career in educational and economic empowerment.
In 2006, Naomi launched The MATCHSTICK Group, a Philadelphia-based nonprofit agency that inspires African American youth to make life-long commitments to purposeful, entrepreneurial, and benevolent civic leadership.
In 2008, Naomi started MyStory Creative, a writing and editing firm that helps individuals, groups, and organizations connect to their audiences.
As Development Manager of The Enterprise Center, Naomi provides research, prospecting, and grantwriting support to the development team. She also manages the organization’s strategic branding/public relations initiatives and is passionate about telling the TEC story.
A musician and vocalist, Naomi also combines her love for the arts with her interests in education in her support of the Picasso Project, an organization that provides funding to public school teachers interested in bringing the arts to their classrooms. Her scholarly research interests include social justice philanthropy, behavioral economics, and womanist theology.
Naomi is enthusiastically engaged in board service for several regional and national organizations. A soon-to-be published author, she was named a 2008 StartingBloc Global Institute for Social Innovation Fellow.
Naomi's Fellowship Project
Mammy, Jezebel, & Sapphire: young black women on sex, femininity, and leadership (MJS) discusses issues of femininity, sexual maturity, and leadership through the eyes of young black women. The book includes:
- analysis of historical frameworks, literature, research, and theory related to black women and woman leadership, and
- frank narratives and interviews of young black (including non-native) women leaders around the country.
The book will focally seek to answer: How do notions of sex, sexuality, and femininity distinctly support or obstruct leadership development for young black women? The project investigates to what extent these women are influenced or traumatized by the messages (historical and contemporary) about femininity and sexuality they learned as girls, and how they now - as young women - reconcile those messages throughout their journeys toward leadership. As important to this work as the publication itself, this project also includes a dissemination strategy (online and in-person) that engages YWTF women in a dialogue around these issues.
This book project will illuminate our conscious, sub-conscious, and institutionalized perceptions of black women, and connect readers to the experiences of women who have historically been marginalized, eroticized, and "othered" in American culture. MJS provides a space for young women to be empowered by candidly discussing mainstreamed issues from a culturally-sensitive perspective. It is a tangible tool women and men can use to begin stigma-shattering, positive thought and action around self-imagery and leadership development.
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Younger women’s task force • 1701 K Street NW Suite 400, Washington, DC 20006 • (202) 293-4505
©2007 National Council of Women’s Organizations. All Rights Reserved.
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