From left to right: José Rivas, Kiarra Ambrose, Cyrah Dardas
In the continued evolution of PIE, we are excited to introduce our new leadership team! This fall, we welcomed Kiarra Ambrose, Cyrah Dardas and Jose Rivas to serve as our Leadership Team!
Last year as PIE prepared for a leadership transition, we reinvisioned leadership roles and positions. Moving away from a single Director, towards a team in hopes of building a supportive and collaborative structure. This leadership team is made up of people who have long standing commitments to PIE and our mission to humanizing learning.
Kiarra is an educator committed to creating brave spaces to explore what it means to learn in community. A native Detroiter, Kiarra has been an educator in the city for over 15 years, becoming a Master Teacher and Training and Support Coordinator within Detroit Public School Community District in 2019. She has also served as PIE’s facilitation fellow since 2020, co-leading the Rida Institute.
Cyrah, a Dearborn native, interdisciplinary Artist and Care Worker who has a longstanding commitment to creating third spaces with and for young people to access liberation through an art making practice. Cyrah brings over 12 years of experience offering these spaces within and out of school in Detroit. Cyrah has been a vital part of the PIE team for five years, and has led a reimagining of our arts education work since 2020 as our lead teaching artist.
José is an educator with more than 15 years of experience working in Detroit, who is committed to fostering deeper connections for young people and educators to engage in personal growth in mathematics classrooms and creative learning spaces. José is also a poet and writer, which led him to become a program lead at 826 Michigan where he supported literacy programming for Detroit youth. Most recently, José was working as a master teacher in Detroit Public Schools Community District.
““We are developing leadership from the communities we work in and with. So often new leaders, especially leaders of color/people of culture are brought into their role with no support - this leadership form hopes to support them in the structure - it’s not a silver bullet but an acknowledgment of interconnectedness in holding power.”
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Collaboration and Structure
We see this new leadership team as commitment to investing in new ways of holding leadership as an organization. This new structure allows PIE to build and support a leadership team made up of people from Detroit, People of color and from communities we work with.
Each member of the Leadership Team has an internal and an external facing role. Kiarra will lead our Leadership Education work and work as Director of Internal Team/ People. José will lead Teacher Education as well as Finance. Cyrah will continue to lead Art Education and lead PIE’s Communications. Allowing each team member to contribute to both programming and operations, our hope is that it will develop into a well rounded team with deep expertise and experience of the public work of programs and the not so visible internal workings of the organization. Our past Directors, Siobhan O’Laoire and Nate Mullen will continue to support and coach the team and PIE.
Please join us in welcoming this new leadership team! We are beyond excited for y’all to get to meet this teamAnd you will, as they share over the coming months their vision and plan for the next phases of PIE’s work.
In the meantime, you can check out our latest offerings, as we recently launched our second round of Radical Wellness as well as a new arts education dinner series Community as Medicine.
