Meet the EDLI Leadership Team

Kevin Pajaro-Mariñez, Institute Director

Phillips Exeter Academy

Mr. Kevin Pajaro-Mariñez (Pah-ha-row | Mah-ree-nies) is a first-generation, Black Latino with Colombian and Dominican roots. He was raised in the wonderful city of Providence, Rhode Island. He joined the Phillips Exeter Academy community as assistant director of Equity and Inclusion in 2021 from the University of Michigan, where he served as a hall director for first and second-year students. Kevin has facilitated various diversity, equity, and inclusion dialogues in K-12, higher education, and professional contexts. Additionally, he founded the Black Men's Reading and Reflection Group (BMRRG). BMRRG is a cohort-based, community-oriented group where Black men come together to think expansively about masculinity. He is committed to cultivating spaces that demand critical reflection, deep relationship-building, and develop capacity for difficult conversations around power, privilege, and oppression.

Rachael A. Blansett​, Leader

Oyster River Cooperative School District 

Rachael Blansett (she/her) is a bi-racial/Black queer femme that hails from the Mitten, right outside of Detroit, MI. Rachael has been honored with the opportunity to serve as the inaugural Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice (DEIJ) Coordinator for the Oyster River Cooperative School District where she supports in designing professional development plans and resources for teachers, cultivating an inclusive learning environment for students, and institutionalizing efforts centered in educational equity. At the core of her work is relationship-building, community engagement, and cultivating educators' and professionals' capacities to engage in equity-based work and initiatives. Prior to her professional journey, she received her M. Ed in Student Affairs with a certificate in Social Justice Education from Iowa State University and a B.S. in Communications with an emphasis in Journalism from Grand Valley State University. Her research and academic passions include: student activism and agency, challenging anti-Blackness and colonization ideology in higher education, and cultivating spaces for QTPoC (Queer/Trans People of Color) sense of belonging and mental heath.

Toyin Augustus, MS Ed.

Across The Tracks Consulting

Toyin Augustus is an educator, DEI practitioner and former Olympian utilizing her skills and experience to invest in transformational social justice. In her 17 years of experience in private and public schools, Toyin has created equitable policies, encouraged inclusive practices, and facilitated educational opportunities for students, educators and adult caretakers. In addition, she has designed frameworks, training, workshops and student affinity leadership programs to facilitate equity and inclusion in organizations.

Toyin is the founder and CEO of Across The Tracks Consulting, using her engaging and empathetic style to guide adult learners through transformative processes. She is currently building a non-profit that integrates athletics and social justice work to inspire and empower youth athletes as change agents for social progress.

Safia Elhillo, Author and Poet

Sudanese by way of Washington, D.C., Safia Elhillo is the author of award-winning work including The January Children (the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets and an Arab American Book Award) and Home Is Not a Country (Coretta Scott King Book Award Author Honor), as well as the national bestseller Girls That Never Die. Elhillo’s work appears in Poetry Magazine, Callaloo, and The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-day series, and in anthologies including The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop and The Penguin Book of Migration Literature. Her fellowships include a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Cave Canem, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Elhillo received the 2015 Brunel International African Poetry Prize, and was listed in Forbes Africa’s 2018 “30 Under 30.”