Holding On, Holding Each Other
Keynote Session
In international schools, counselors are often the steady presence holding so much together. You support students navigating identity, educators adapting to change, families in transition, and systems that are still catching up. It’s a role filled with purpose but also pressure.
And in a world that feels increasingly uncertain where the needs are many and the pace is relentless this isn’t a passing thought. It’s a real and pressing question for many of us: How do we keep showing up and bring others with us without burning out or breaking down?
In this keynote, Jacinta Williams brings her warmth, honesty, and deep experience helping schools create the conditions for all students to thrive to explore what it really means to lead like a bridge. Picking up where Rosalind Wiseman’s keynote leaves off, Jacinta shifts the focus from understanding the systems we’re in to sustaining ourselves within them, emotionally, relationally, and practically.
Jacinta will draw on her work with international counselors and DEIB change agents to share grounded strategies for maintaining your purpose, building community, and caring for yourself while leading others. This keynote isn’t about doing more. It’s about doing what matters, in ways that are human and sustainable. Through story, reflection, and actionable tools, Jacinta offers a space to reconnect with your purpose, your people, and your own capacity.
You’ll leave with:
- A clearer understanding of what it means to lead like a bridge, not alone but alongside
- Strategies to build collective capacity instead of carrying the weight alone
- Ideas for fostering belonging and resilience in schools where systemic change takes time
- Permission to lead from authenticity, not exhaustion
Whether you’re showing up steady, stretched, or somewhere in between, this keynote offers a moment to pause, realign, and reset. Both a call to action and a call to rest, because both are essential for the kind of leadership this moment requires.
About the Jacinta Williams
Jacinta Williams is a social justice and racial equity practitioner with almost 20 years of experience facilitating change in public, independent, and international education as well as in nonprofits and corporations. Jacinta started her work in social justice as a front-line advocate to ensure women of color in the city of Atlanta had access to HIV/AIDS testing, programmatic resources, and clinical trials. In 2002, she co-created the Metro Atlanta Women of Color Initiative (MAWOCI), Atlanta’s first and still leading HIV testing program for women of color.
After her time in public health, Jacinta continued her work in ensuring equitable access for marginalized communities in the education field where she worked to incorporate diversity, equity, and inclusion into teaching and learning and school
systems, policies ,and processes. Jacinta is a skilled coach, process designer and facilitator and has experience designing and leading meaningful engagement and learning experiences across the entire ecosystem.
As a former teacher, instructional coach, and DEI leader in large non-profits, she brings a wealth of context and experience with engaging individuals, teams, and organizations in strategically addressing challenging and complex issues and integrating equitable processes to achieve equitable outcomes in structures, systems, policies, programs, and practices.
Most recently, she served as the Head of Equity and Inclusion at Atlanta International School and now works with local and international schools and companies to recognize and disrupt any cultural norms, processes and practices that prevent the community from living into its expressed diversity, equity, and inclusion commitment and goals. She focuses her work on building the capacity of people to materially shift conditions so that everyone can thrive and partners with organizations and people who are serious about ensuring conditions that work for everyone.
She earned a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology summa cum laude from Emory University and a Master’s Degree in Education from Oglethorpe University. In her spare time, you can find her working out, traveling, reading fantasy novels, and supporting community development efforts.