Rev. Dereca Blackmon is a passionate speaker, facilitator, and national expert on topics of diversity, equity, and inclusion. For over 25 years she has consulted with a wide variety of corporate, educational, nonprofit, and community-based groups to facilitate “uncommon conversations” on issues of race, gender, class, and social justice. Her experiential training models cut through “diversity fatigue” and allow participants to engage in deep, authentic, and meaningful dialogues.

She served as the Assistant Vice Provost and Director of the Diversity and First-Generation Office at Stanford University, where she introduced groundbreaking work on authentic engagement, intergroup dialogue, and unconscious bias to over 30,000 students, staff, faculty, and alumni. She also taught several courses at Stanford, including Intergroup Communication with renowned cultural psychologist Hazel Markus, which typically has a waitlist of over 250 students.

Dereca co-led the effort to organize the Bay Area community response to the murder of Oscar Grant III by transit police. After mobilizing thousands of protestors and holding countless meetings and rallies, she began to question the strategy of organizing “against” rather than “for.” She entered ministerial school and has never looked back, becoming one of the nation’s leading speakers on spiritual activism.

Her training, activism, and youth development work have been featured in two books — Black Youth Rising by Dr. Shawn Ginwright, and Learning to Liberate by Dr. Vajra Watson — and cited in countless national forums, including The Wall Street Journal, CNN, and The New York Times.