Avis Ransom believes in creating change through collective political action and sustained, organized public education and engagement. She has experience in grassroots organizing, organizational development and in the development and operation of worker cooperatives. She holds a Masters in Business Administration and spent 15 years operating her own business. Today, Ms. Ransom provides consultive and hands-on support to non profit organizations, helping them to increase their effectiveness through branding, organizational development, training and coaching in grass roots organizing and funding development.
Dottye Burt- Markowitz founded Paso Training and Consulting in 1989 to provide anti-racism/anti-oppression training and consultation to individuals and nonprofit organizations. She has worked with a wide range of organizations from national advocacy groups to colleges and universities to community based grassroots organizations. Her perspective and approach to the work is rooted in her experience growing up in a white blue collar family in East St. Louis, Illinois, attending college in Texas in the ‘60’s, working as a public aid caseworker in New York in the ‘70’s, and seeing how white supremacy operated in the “progressive left” while working for a national peace organization in the ‘80’s. She trained with Dr. Margo Okazawa-Rey and owes an immeasurable debt to the many colleagues of color who have been partners in the work.
Dianne Lyday is retired from the Social Security Administration (SSA) after 34 years of service in Kansas City and Baltimore. During the final ten years of her service she was responsible for large-scale project management in Social Security’s information technology department. In addition to her regular duties, she informally acted as an advisor to executive management on racial equity. Raised in a small, homogeneous, farming community in Ohio, Dianne has spent the decades since then in various metropolitan cities across the U.S. settling finally in Baltimore. She began her Bachelor’s degree at the University of California at Los Angeles, and finished at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas. She completed a Masters in Theology at Baltimore’s St. Mary’s Seminary & University’s Ecumenical Institute. She served on the Strategic Planning Committee for the Susannah Wesley Home, a transitional home for women and children in Baltimore City, and on the Board of Directors for the Night of Peace homeless shelter in Baltimore County. She has been an active member of Baltimore Racial Justice Action (BRJA) since its inception in 2003 and has served as a facilitator/co-facilitator/presenter in anti-racism workshops for the U.S. Social Forum, the national White Privilege Conference, Baltimore’s Radical Bookfair, and numerous religious institutions. She is also a regular co-facilitator of BRJA’s 8-week “Confronting Racism” courses. Most recently, she has done organizational development training and coaching with a small non-profit preparing for its own 501(c)(3) status.
