Looking back, Shavon realizes that perhaps she was always interested in healing — just not in the way she first imagined. “I thought I was going to help with disease,” she says, “but it was really disease of systems.” The little girl who wanted to know why Emmett Till had been killed had grown into a woman committed to asking difficult questions about systems, power, and justice. She could never have predicted that the road would eventually lead to NCNW. But in hindsight, the path feels like a remarkable full circle.
Leading NCNW means inheriting an extraordinary history. For Shavon, names like Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune and Dr. Dorothy I. Height are not simply portraits on a wall. They represent a mandate. Bethune founded NCNW during the Great Depression with a revolutionary premise: bring Black women from different organizations, regions, and socioeconomic backgrounds together and turn their collective influence into power. Shavon believes that the premise is just as relevant now. Her challenge is determining how to honor it without treating history as something too precious to evolve. Some traditions, she says, are nonnegotiable. Standards matter. How women present themselves matters. How members treat one another matters. Values matter. But preserving values does not require preserving every method.
For years, Shavon says, some people viewed NCNW through a narrow lens: the older women who gave scholarships or collected backpacks for children. She saw something much bigger. “The way that I honor her legacy is to mobilize in the radicalism of who she was,” Shavon says of Bethune. Bethune, after all, was not timid about power. She built an educational institution, advised presidents, organized Black women nationally, and used relationships strategically to create opportunities that had previously been denied. That, to Shavon, is the tradition worth preserving.
Under her leadership, that has meant modernizing operations, strengthening NCNW’s policy presence, moving more intentionally into digital spaces, and opening the organization to a new generation. She has seen significant growth among younger women, and she wants more of them not simply in the room—but in leadership. There is also a deeply personal reason she accepted the challenge. Before taking the position, Shavon had reservations. She had already built a career and founded a company. She did not need another title simply for the sake of having one. In fact, she initially turned down the opportunity.
The initial decline of the position proved to be a pivotal moment in history because the late Alexis Herman did what any influential mentor and strategist would do in this moment - call in reinforcements to ensure the deal would be closed. Bishop Leah Daughtry made the initial call to implore me to reconsider what would be an honor of a lifetime. And if that wasn't enough, Alexis posed a question that stopped her cold: “Are you going to tell the ancestors no?” For a woman whose life had been shaped by history, the question landed exactly where Herman apparently knew it would. Shavon said yes. Today, she describes her responsibility as honoring Bethune, Height, and the generations of women who built NCNW by standing firmly in its mission—while giving herself permission to make sure America sees the organization as a force in the present.
