Woo Williams-Zou

Senior Equity Leadership Consultant

wwilliams (at) nationalequityproject.org

Woo Williams-Zou has served as an educator and youth advocate in the San Francisco Bay Area for the last 25 years. Her experiences with racism growing up inspired her to explore multiple pathways toward promoting love, healing, and social justice by improving learning experiences with and for young people from oppressed and marginalized communities who are hurt by systemic oppression. She studied law and became an attorney with the hope of transforming oppressive systems from the inside out, but ultimately decided that education was the best avenue to accomplish this goal.

She became a high school English teacher, and began a lifelong journey of pursuing the art of teaching and facilitating humanizing learning experiences.  After hearing students’ stories of dehumanizing experiences in some of their classrooms and school spaces, Woo realized that she wanted to have an impact beyond the four walls of her classroom.  She served in a variety of teacher leadership roles with the goal of supporting adult educators to do the inside-out work necessary to host humanizing and liberating learning experiences.  This work guided her to join a community of revolutionary educators committed to social justice and liberation in schools, and together, they co-founded a school dedicated to offering safe, nurturing, and empowering learning experiences for BIPOC students who were not experiencing success in traditional schools.  After teaching and working as an instructional coach and director of Instruction in that school, she attended UC Berkeley’s Principal Leadership Institute to sharpen her leadership skills and moved into the role of  principal.

Eventually, she decided it was time to work towards liberation in education on a systemic level, beyond the four walls of her school building.  Now, she is blessed to continue her commitment to love, healing, and justice as a coach, facilitator, and consultant with the National Equity Project and as a lecturer with the Principal Leadership Institute in UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education.Woo earned her B.A. in English and Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley, her J.D. from UC Law San Francisco (formerly known as UC Hastings College of the Law), her teaching credential from San Francisco State University, and her administrative credential and M.A. in Education from UC Berkeley.