The Mind Trust’s fellowship programs help unleash world-class educators to realize their dreams – so they can enable students to achieve their potential.
This is the third blog in The Mind Trust’s series celebrating our 20th anniversary. This series of 20 blogs will feature people who have helped shape The Mind Trust at all stages of our organization. This piece features the perspectives of two of The Mind Trust’s former fellows, Eddie Rangel, Executive Director of Adelante Schools, and Mariama Shaheed, CEO and Founder of Global Preparatory Academy.
Eddie Rangel has always struggled with imposter syndrome.
The highly accomplished founder of a successful innovation network school, Adelante Schools, said he has a tendency to “think there’s someone who’s better at this that deserves to be doing it instead of me.”
So when he had the opportunity in 2019 to take over a long-struggling K-8 school and reopen it as Adelante, he got a pit in his stomach thinking about the prospect.
Rangel and his school’s co-founder, Matthew Rooney, were only a year into a two-year fellowship supported by The Mind Trust to help them launch and lead a high-quality school in Indianapolis. Answering the call to start their school at Emma Donnan Elementary and Middle School would mean cutting their fellowship a year short and – they would later find out – begin the school launch process in the midst of a global pandemic.
In the face of these challenges, Rangel and Rooney said yes, buoyed by others’ belief in them and the support they received from The Mind Trust’s fellowship.
“It was folks at the Mind Trust, our supporters in our corner who said, ‘You have the tools necessary and we’ll give you the resources, but you can do this,’” Rangel said. “It was that firm belief of possibility, and confidence in (us) that led Matthew and I to say, ‘Yeah, we can do this.’ If we’ve got our community around us, helping us navigate this, we’ll do it.”
Rangel’s experience sums up the power of The Mind Trust’s two-year fellowships to help talented education leaders launch and operate high-quality autonomous schools. During the fellowship, the nonprofit scaffolds educators with support – from community connections, to tactical guidance with details like facilities acquisition and hiring, to experiences visiting other schools to learn from best-in-class models.
But the most powerful aspect of the experience is having a group of people who believe in you so much, you’re compelled to believe even more in yourself.
“So many times as educators, we have this envisioning that we do: ‘It’d be great if I could do this. It’d be great if I could do that,’” said Dr. Mariama Shaheed, who was among The Mind Trust’s first fellows to launch a school, Global Prep Academy, in 2016. “Without a quarterback entity like The Mind Trust, a lot of educators wouldn’t take the risks to leave a comfortable space where they are and step into a space of innovation and opportunity.”
Support with a Daunting Task
Starting a school from scratch feels overwhelming – even for highly accomplished educators like Shaheed and Rangel.
By the time she was thinking about launching Global Prep Academy, Shaheed had spent nearly two decades as a district educator and principal and had won the prestigious Milliken National Educator Award. Rangel also had extensive experience and had completed a national fellowship program and earned his master’s degree from Columbia University.
But the details of hiring staff, securing a facility, establishing a curriculum, and leading change management among the existing student body can be daunting. And it’s difficult for principals who want to launch schools to make time to work through these questions while they are inundated with their day jobs of leading schools.
The Mind Trust affords leaders two years as paid fellows so they can thoughtfully plan all of the key details of school incubation, and the nonprofit provides critical support along the way. Shaheed said she especially appreciated The Mind Trust’s approach of honoring her ideas and vision – and offering connections and guidance to help make them a reality.
“In the early days of the fellowship, I can remember having meetings with members of The Mind Trust team, and they would help me take my ideas and put them into tactical next steps,” Shaheed said. “The thing I appreciated so much was this level of autonomy to not change my ideas, but to really help me frame them, to make them into something that was buildable.”
As one example of this, Shaheed, whose school is a dual-language immersion model serving predominantly students from low-income communities, had the opportunity to spend six weeks in Mexico City, where she was embedded in a high-quality school. She secured the opportunity based on a connection The Mind Trust’s founder made for her.
For Rangel, who was opening in the midst of COVID-19, The Mind Trust played an instrumental role in helping his team plan how and when to re-open schools and address systemic challenges students faced during the lockdown period – such as the lack of learning devices.
The fellowship’s support also spans beyond the two-year planning period. For Shaheed, The Mind Trust has continued to be a critical partner in Global Prep’s success.
For example, when Shaheed decided to develop a strategic plan, The Mind Trust connected her with a partner. When Global Prep needed to hire staff, the Mind Trust helped secure a headhunting firm.
And it was The Mind Trust that first planted the seed that Global Prep should consider opening a second school to meet student demand. When Shaheed decided to pursue expansion, The Mind Trust helped secure a facility for the second school, which will open in 2026.
Beyond direct support from The Mind Trust, Shaheed said the community that’s been built across alumni of the fellowship program has provided a powerful source of guidance.
“I think when we first opened in 2016, there weren’t a whole lot of Mind Trust- incubated schools, and now there are so many,” she said. “It’s almost like you’re part of a family and a community of people that either came through The Mind Trust or receive support.”
An Impact across the Community
The Mind Trust’s support for its fellows translates into positive outcomes that ripple across students, families, and the city.
Adelante Schools has been operating for five years on Indianapolis’ south side – anchored by a vision of setting high expectations for students and elevating teaching as the core ingredient of student success.
In its five years, Rangel said, he’s proud of how the school has rebuilt trust with a community that saw dramatic turnover in operators and negative student outcomes over the previous decades. In the process, academic achievement has slowly, but meaningfully, improved.
This year, Adelante has the highest number of third graders who are proficient in reading in the history of the school – and the highest number of second graders who have ever been proficient in reading, per the third-grade state exam.
“We are collectively rewriting a narrative about an entire school community that has been very deficit-based,” Rangel said. “When we stepped into our school, what we were told about our kids is that some of them don’t want to learn or some of them aren’t capable of doing all the things that you’re going to ask them to do. It wasn’t the kids who changed. It wasn’t the community that changed. It was the support and the deep belief and optimism that our kids in our community are capable of success.”
Global Prep Academy, which celebrates its 10-year anniversary in 2026, also is reshaping expectations for students, particularly students of color and those from low-income communities. Shaheed said her vision for the school has always been to offer experiences typically limited to the elite – such as language immersion, orchestra, and newspaper – to all students. That translates into a group of kids who feel empowered to make a difference in the world and believe in their own capabilities of doing so.
“I want our kids to speak truth to power,” Shaheed said. “I want them to have the confidence not just to speak in one language, but two. I want our kids to take up space and know that they came from here, and there was lots that we poured into them, so they can be the leaders that we need in this community.”
Both Rangel and Shaheed credit the impact their schools are making to the foundational support The Mind Trust provided through its fellowship – and continues to provide for them.
Rangel said when he talks to peers nationally about The Mind Trust, their response is often the same.
“Their eyes widen and they say, ‘I cannot imagine the type of support that I would feel as a school leader if we had an organization like that in our city – or the amount of peace I would have as a school leader, knowing that someone else is thinking about the good of my children at our school or the academic outcomes of our school,’’” Rangel said. “We need The Mind Trust in Indianapolis to be that catalyst for change. Schools can’t do it alone.”