Northside Achievement Zone

Sondra Samuels, President & CEO - Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ)

Sondra Sameuls is the President & CEO of the Northside Achievement Zone (NAZ), a collaborative of over 30 partner nonprofits and schools. Ms. Samuels has been a resident of North Minneapolis for over two decades and is a national leader committed to results-based leadership and accountability. She, her staff, and their partners work tirelessly to ensure the integration of effective cradle-to-career solutions across the NAZ collaborative - to scale and sustain results across the community and to achieve the systems and policy changes needed for low-income families and children of color to truly share in the prosperity of the Twin Cities Region. Under her leadership, NAZ was named a federal Promise Neighborhood Program, and has become a nationally recognized model for place-based community and systems change. Sondra serves on the boards of HealthPartners, Great MN Schools, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Community Advisory Board, and is a member of the leadership team at Generation Next. She received her Bachelor's degree from Morgan State University in Baltimore, MD, and an MBA from Clark-Atlanta University in Atlanta, GA. 

Along with parents, students, partners, and staff, Sondra is leading a revolutionary culture shift in North Minneapolis focused on ending multigenerational poverty through education and family stability. The NAZ Collaborative is working toward a single goal; to prepare low-income North Minneapolis children to graduate from high school, and college, ready for a career. NAZ has scaled up in support of over 1,000 parents and 2,300 students as they turn the social service model on its head and lead the creation of a college-bound culture throughout the community.