Marcus L. Strother is a father, husband, educator and a youth and community advocate. Marcus is a 20 year veteran in the education field spending 17 years in Illinois and has since relocated to Sacramento, California for the past two and half years. Marcus spent 8 years as a classroom teacher, teaching Language Arts, Life and Social Skills and Advocacy. Marcus also spent 9 years as a high school administrator with a focus on teacher evaluation, PBIS, school culture, and discipline. Marcus is currently the Director of Youth Development at Sacramento City Unified School District. In this role, Marcus oversees Expanded Learning Programs, Summer Programming and Boys and Girls of Color work, which includes the coordination of the Men’s and Women’s Leadership Academy.

MLA and WLA are both A-G developed curriculums, with a focus on social justice development to help young men and women become advocates for change for self, culture and community. Men’s and Women’s Leadership Academy students go through leadership development, social justice advocacy and real-life experiences that lend themselves to the movement that Marcus and his team have created called Life Data Matters. Marcus is an avid advocate for young people living by his statement; “I work with young people who have biographies. They are not data points. The biggest truth in what we do comes for the human assessment testimony of our young people.”

Marcus is a member of the CoolSpeak Youth Engagement Team leading National Gear Up Youth Leadership Camps, provides professional teacher training in the Freedom Writers Methodology as a Freedom Writer Teacher and spends Wednesday nights teaching a Creative Writing class at Folsom State Prison as a board member for the non-profit 916 Ink. Marcus and his wife have traveled abroad with students to build 3 schools in the Dominican Republic and will be taking the MLA and WLA students to Peru in June of 2019 to work with a Coffee Farming Village for two weeks.