Living Their Genius: Alex Bernadotte
By Michelle Molitor, with Nicole Young
The Living Their Genius series is dedicated to profiling the organizations and people who compose the wider community of The Equity Lab. Even when you may feel alone in this work, we hope these highlights will remind you that we are always doing this together. As bell hooks encourages us, “When we talk about that which will sustain and nurture our spiritual growth as a people, we must once again talk about the importance of community. For one of the most vital ways that we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.”
It’s hard to capture the fire in Alex Bernadotte’s voice when you hear her describe our country’s urgent need to reimagine higher education.
Her anger is righteous, she is impossibly sure, and it’s clear she’s undeterred by any obstacle she encounters in her fight for the young people she serves. What’s even more evident is that her clarity and fuel come from a place that is both incredibly communal and deeply personal.
Alex is a Black woman, a Haitian immigrant, and was a first generation college student, identities that she will proudly tell you ground so much of her personal and professional life. Her journey to college began in the 7th grade, with a conversation in a hospital staff room in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Alex’s mother, a phlebotomist at the hospital, overheard a discussion between a few white doctors about where those doctors were sending their children to college and that night she came home to tell Alex that she knew exactly what they needed to do. “You have to go to this thing called an Ivy League,” Alex recounts. “And you have to go to this place called Dartmouth...And that is how the dream started to take shape.”
As CEO and Founder of Beyond 12, an organization whose mission is to dramatically increase the number of students from under-resourced communities who graduate from college and who translate their degrees into meaningful employment and choice-filled lives, Alex thinks a lot about young people’s college dreams. Her own college transition was a bumpy one. For years after her mom’s Dartmouth realization, Alex and her family worked toward the dream of having Alex be the first person in her family to go to college. When she was accepted at Dartmouth, her family, like so many families of Black and brown children who are “the first,” caravanned to school, determined to walk their baby into her future. But getting to college just wasn’t enough.
“I struggled: academically, financially, socially, and emotionally. In every sense of the word. For 17 years, we had focused on getting in — we had never talked about, you know, what life would be like after getting in,” Alex remembers. She felt like she was failing her community, failing the caravan that had so confidently supported her journey to higher education, and that she might not become the first person in her family to graduate from college after all. Alex felt alone, she felt unsupported, and she felt like she, not Dartmouth, was ill-equipped for the transition.
Beyond 12 exists, in large part, because of Alex’s experiences in college. She was eventually able to turn things around, but only through the help of her family, her peers, and a network of Black women mentors on campus who let her know, in no uncertain terms, that she was not failing on their watch. But it was a struggle. Even after she graduated, the experience left Alex asking a lot of questions. She remembers wondering, “Why did this happen to me? Why does this happen to so many students with backgrounds and stories similar to mine? What could I have done differently?” As she encountered more and more of these harrowing college stories in her professional career, she also began asking fewer questions about where she, as a student, went wrong, and more about where the institutions in her story and so many others went wrong. In fact, Alex shares that only 42% of Black students and 49% of Latinx students earn a degree after six years, compared to close to 70% of white students. Students from homes where neither parent has earned a degree are twice as likely as those with college-educated parents to leave before their second year.
Alex recalls that there was a term at Dartmouth that the Black and brown students used to describe what was happening to students like them. “The Dean of Students’ office used to be in this building called Parkhurst, and parkhurst became a verb in the Black community at Dartmouth. It was like, ‘I didn't see this person this semester.’ and ‘Oh, girl, she got parkhursted.’” In most cases, Black students were graduating in spite of the institution, not because of it.
Now, Alex and Beyond 12 and are in the business of transforming higher education so that the students they work with are able not only to graduate from college, but to break cycles of generational poverty, to thrive, and to live what she refers to as “choice-filled lives.” Beyond 12 understands that the higher education system is inequitable by design and that it was designed to compound privilege for a select few Americans. The organization also believes students are creative, resourceful, and whole. Their model is based on coaching students, not trying to “fix” them. Armed with that knowledge, they are equipped to help as many students as possible earn their degrees, of course. But, perhaps even more importantly, they are fulfilling their mission by inspiring and mobilizing those young people to change the system — to redesign higher education into a system that could actually place the experiences of Black and brown students at the center.
Ultimately, Alex says: “For us, racial equity has to be at the core of the solution…If we can inspire a movement led by Black students, led by Latinx students, then I think everybody wins. If those students can redesign a higher education system, the redesign will be more accessible, more affordable, more equitable, more just, and I think, will ultimately prepare all students to earn degrees that allow them to thrive in this global global economy.”
Learn more about the amazing work of Beyond 12 and how you can support them here.
About Alex Bernadotte
Alex has more than 18 years of executive management and strategic development experience in the nonprofit and private sectors. Immediately before launching Beyond 12, Alex was an entrepreneur in residence at NewSchools Venture Fund where she developed the business plan for Beyond 12.
Alex's previous professional experience includes serving as executive director of The Princeton Review's Silicon Valley office; executive director of Foundation for a College Education, a nonprofit college access program; co-founder and vice president of marketing at educational travel startup Explorica; director of operations at EF Education; and operations manager at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, where she coordinated the efforts of an international youth substance abuse prevention foundation. Alex currently serves on the board of directors of Great Oakland Public Schools and Cengage, and the board of advisors of the Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship and the Presidential Commission for Financial Aid at Dartmouth College.
Alex received her undergraduate degree from Dartmouth and earned a master's degree with a concentration in policy and organizational leadership from Stanford. She is an Ashoka Fellow, a recipient of the 2011 NewSchools Venture Fund Entrepreneur of the Year award, a 2012 Jefferson Award for Public Service winner, a Dartmouth College Social Justice Award and Stanford University Alumni Excellence in Education Award honoree, and a Fellow of the 22nd class of the Pahara - Aspen Education Fellowship. In addition, Beyond 12 was named one of the world's 10 most innovative education companies by Fast Company and the organization’s MyCoach mobile app won the 2016 Xammy Award for best social impact app from Xamarin, a Microsoft-owned mobile development platform.
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