Boston's largest network of inclusive leaders

Nia Evans is the Executive Director of the Boston Ujima Project. Her educational background is in the areas of labor relations, education leadership, and policy. Her advocacy includes a focus on eliminating barriers between analysts and people with lived experiences as well as increasing acknowledgement of the value of diverse types of expertise in policy. She is a co-creator, along with artist Tomashi Jackson, of Frames Debate Project, a multimedia policy debate project that explores the intersection between drug policy, mental health services and incarceration in the state of Massachusetts.

Ms. Evans has a B.S. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University and a Master of Arts in Education Leadership, with a course of study in Leadership, Policy, and Politics from Teachers College at Columbia University. She also studied abroad at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, where she focused on International Labor Relations.

Madeligne Tena joined the Compass team in September 2020 as a coaching manager. In this role, she manages a team of financial coaches and also coaches clients one-on-one. Prior to her role as a coaching manager, she spent the last decade serving families with low incomes and of many different backgrounds, in a number of different capacities to assist families with accessing vital need-based programs. As a result, she has helped hundreds of families access food stamps and childcare vouchers, calculated peoples’ rental payment obligations in a federal housing voucher program, and helped individuals experiencing homelessness find and secure affordable housing. Madeligne also spent some time helping residents in low-income housing communities to work around issues of neighborhood gentrification, stabilization, and displacement.

In her most recent role as a financial capabilities manager, she ran a VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) site in the city of Chelsea, where she and her team of volunteers helped people access valuable poverty-reducing tax credits and conducted financial education classes.

Madeligne is an advocate and servant at heart. Madeligne wants to see people achieve financial stability and mobility and aspires to get financial education implemented into schools. She also hopes to be a part of a movement of practitioners that works to influence and change policy around income-based programs that keep people of color from building wealth.

In her spare time, she enjoys giving resources to people that are rent burdened or in need of housing and likes exploring new places to eat in her Dorchester neighborhood, where she lives with her husband, who is a Boston Public Schools teacher, and their two sons.

Kamaria Moore-Hollis is the Economic Mobility Manager for the Department of Transitional Assistance, overseeing several of DTA’s Employment and Training programs. Employment and Training programs support the Department’s mission of assisting and empowering low-income individuals and families to meet their basic needs, improve their quality of life, and achieve long term economic self-sufficiency.  

As the Economic Mobility Manager, Kamaria plays a pivotal role in aligning priorities between a network of state-wide community-based providers, DTA specialty staff, and various state agencies that touch low-income families. Kamaria also leads the Department in Young Parent matters, overseeing our statewide Young Parent Program, collaborating with the Department of Public Health on the MA Pregnant and Parenting Teen Initiative, and serving on the Transitional Age Youth Task Force.

Kamaria holds both a BA and an MA in Public Administration from Clark University in Worcester, MA.