Facilitating Growth and Transformation  through Social Impact Collaboration

Byron P. White is a distinguished thought leader and experienced administrator in the fields of higher education and community engagement. He is known nationally for his strategic vision and commitment to achieving transformational change by building powerful collaboration between civic institutions and urban communities. With a career spanning more than three decades, Dr. White possesses a diverse array of professional experience in higher education, executive leadership, non-profit administration, inclusion and diversity, community engagement, and media communications. Deploying skills in collective impact, asset-based community development, and results-based facilitation, he designs and leads mutually beneficial interactions that produce transformative solutions for communities and organizations.

Dr. White has spent his career as a journalist and administrator in academic, corporate, non-profit, and public sectors forging impactful strategic partnerships between civic institutions and communities. He is currently a Senior Consultant with Sova Solutions, a higher education consultancy based in Washington, DC, focused on large-scale strategic change.

Most recently, as Associate Provost for Urban Research and Community Engagement at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, Dr. White oversaw urbanCORE (Community-Oriented Research and Engagement), an office charged with connecting the University’s interdisciplinary, academic resources to community assets to co- produce transformative solutions to societal issues. He also was an Affiliate Faculty appointment in UNC Charlotte’s Department of Educational Leadership. Previously, Dr. White held several leadership positions that allowed him to drive change and make a significant impact. He was the Executive Director of StrivePartnership, a Cincinnati-based collective impact organization focused on education improvement for urban learners from cradle to career, and a Vice President of its sponsor organization, Knowledge Works Foundation. He also served as Vice President for University Engagement and Chief Diversity Officer at Cleveland State University, Vice Chancellor for Economic Advancement for the University System of Ohio, and Associate Vice President for Community Engagement at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he was the founding director of the Eigel Center for Community Engaged Learning.

Dr. White began his career as a newspaper journalist, serving as the editorial page editor of The Cincinnati Post, and as an editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune and editor of the Tribune’s Urban Affairs Team. He later became the Tribune’s senior manager for community relations. Between newspaper stints, Dr. White was active in community development efforts as founding director of the Conference of Walnut Hills Churches for Community Economic Development in Cincinnati and as a consultant to community-based organizations on Chicago’s West Side through the Asset-Based Community Development Institute at DePaul University, on whose national board he serves.

He is on the Advisory Board of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University and holds a doctorate in higher education management from the University of Pennsylvania, a master’s degree in social science from the University of Chicago, and a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the Honors Tutorial College at Ohio University. Dr. White sits on the local boards of the Levine Museum of the New South and the West Boulevard Cooperative Food Market in Charlotte, NC, where he resides. He has five adult children and five granddaughters, and enjoys camping in the mountains, golfing and playing the saxophone.