PROFILES IN LEADERSHIP KIESHA EDGE HELPS OTHERS TACKLE ISSUES OF RACIAL BIAS

BY MICHELLE SOLOMON

Kiesha Edge said she always had a stirring in her soul. It was what the “40 under 40” honoree said was present for as long as she can remember.

Edge, 38, calls it a “burn of passion” for wanting people to understand what she couldn’t put into words as a young girl growing up in Daytona Beach.

As national director of

Education Operations for the Anti-Defamation League, she has a platform to educate others and work with facilitators on programs that address diversity and race. Promoted twice since she began working with ADL in 2016, she is now at the organization’s national office in

Manhattan, where she oversees more than 450 education facilitators across the United States. Her home base remains Broward County.

“One of the things that we teach is that everyone has bias . . . Some people don’t want to address it, while some are more willing than others,” Edge said. “We live in a society where systemic racism is alive and well.”

Hers is a “progressive story,” from growing up in Daytona Beach as the only Black child in an elementary class, vividly recalling a teacher making overtly racist remarks, and the feeling of being out of place as the only person of color in her Girl Scouts troop.

She wasn’t searching for a new job when she applied to work with the Anti-Defamation League,” Edge explained. As program director at the Florida Department of Health in Broward County, she had a string of successes. “I wasn’t looking to make a move, but I felt like there was something else I had to do.”

In 2016, Edge became education project director for the Florida Region, where one of her efforts was to provide anti-bias training for law enforcement, including Miami

Beach and the City of Miami police departments.

Edge reflected that one of the most profound wake-up calls in her desire to make a difference happened when she was eight months pregnant with her son, Kyson, in 2013.

She had a moment of panic and called her husband and said, “Do you think bringing another Black boy into this world is what we should be doing?” She thought it was tragic that she was second guessing starting a family because of her race.

In the wake of George Floyd’s death, Edge said she feels even more deeply about the work she is doing. “As a Black woman in this country, implicit bias and working against racism has always been a concern of mine. Now people of other races are starting to see and feel that it is just as important to them, too. n