Co-founder Twin Cities Innovation Alliance (TCIA) & Executive Director, Midwest Center for School Transformation (MCST)

As an interdisciplinary and cross-sector thought leader and community advocate Marika Pfefferkorn is a change agent working to transform educational ecosystems and scale successes. Ms. Pfefferkorn’s work begins in community and arcs to the regional and national scope. Her experience covers policy, leadership, research, community building and engagement. She integrates cultural wisdom, and the arts and applies a restorative lens to upend punitive conditions in education and society, leading with a vison for collective liberation and self-determination. In an effort to disrupt the Cradle to Prison Algorithm (an expansion of the School to Prison Pipeline/ School and Prison Nexus), Ms. Pfefferkorn teaches, trains and coaches’ youth, families, and systems on youth data criminalization at the intersection of education and technology. She copowers with a diversity of communities to center data justice through projects and programming like the No Data About Us Without Us Fellowship and Digital Justice Ideathon. Ms. Pfefferkorn’s work demonstrates an agile approach to community engagement, meeting people and systems where they are to educate, equip and activate solutions that reflect and benefit communities. She has successfully co-led campaigns to end discriminatory suspension practices in Minnesota schools, to remove the presence of police in Minneapolis and St. Paul schools, to increase investment in indigenous restorative practices in education. She co-developed and co-taught Carcerality and Education at Carleton College.

She is an organizing member of Education for Liberation Minnesota Chapter, a founding member of the Racial Justice S.T. E. A.M. Collective and co-founder of the No Tech Criminalization in Education (NOTICE) Coalition, and the Stop the Cradle to Prison Algorithm Coalition.

Professor in the Department of Educational Studies, Carleton College, Northfield, MN.

Anita attended public middle and high schools in New York City and identifies deeply as a New Yorker. Her research and teaching interests include student and teacher perspectives on race, gender, and sexuality and issues of diversity and difference in educational institutions. Her research broadly focuses on how educational institutions can be supportive and resource-full environments for everyone (students, teachers, and staff) so that no one has to be individually resilient or exceptional. From 2018-2022, she was the co-principal investigator on an AmeriCorps-funded participatory action research (PAR) project in Faribault, Minnesota, collaborating with youth, parents, teachers, and administrators. You can find more information about the project here (also available in Spanish and Somali). That website also has general resources and information about PAR. She is currently the principal investigator of a second AmeriCorps funded grant that builds on the networks developed from the first grant and focuses on Youth Participatory Action Research in five Minnesota school districts. More information about this grant can be found here. Anita is a member of the Education for Liberation Network, Minnesota chapter and of The Spoilers Collective, a group of academics of color, who produce a podcast called “The Drip” where they discuss books by authors of color.