We have two AWESOME additions to our VOX Family!
Nicole Kelly joined the staff as our Administrative Coordinator!
Nicole is a writer and event planner with a history of working with organizations that promote women and girls in the arts, such as the Rock N Roll Camps for Girls; Orange County’s Grrl Fair, a festival celebrating girls and music; and TRAMA Textiles, a women’s fair trade weaving cooperative in the highlands of Guatemala. She is also a host of bitchface, a podcast about gender & feminism.
She gained valuable coordinating and event planning experience as the founder and organizer of Summer Commune (2012-2015), a yearly event for urban creatives that took place in a variety of small town communities. In Moscow, Idaho, she coordinated with venues, arts organizations, city councils, tourism boards, and artists to plan events like comedy shows, band showcases, literary readings, panels, and public town hall meetings. In 2015, she coordinated a tour of Tijuana and the Valle de Guadalupe Wine Country (Baja, Mexico) for 30 travelers from the LA area.
Nicole was a teaching artist at AMDA: College & Conservatory of the Performing Arts in Hollywood, and with Right-to-Write, a prison writing initiative in western New York.
She earned a degree in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and an MFA from the Programs In Writing at UC Irvine. Her fiction has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Drunken Boat, Fiction Southeast, and The Carolina Quarterly, and her essays have appeared in Selfish and yr an adult. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and chosen for inclusion in the Best Small Fictions 2016 anthology. She is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow.
Lawrence V. Fitz is our newest governing board member!
Lawrence V. Fitz has worked as a leadership strategist in challenging and diverse roles in private, education, and non-profit environments. His experience includes being a classroom teacher in the areas of career education, music and theatre; coordinating and managing grant activities; recruiting and developing talent; serving as lead site administrator; composing curriculum and designing instructional programs; managing program budgets; and hiring/supervising/evaluating programs and staff at multiple locations. For five years, he shared his expertise with Southern California Edison, one of the largest employers in southern California, for whom he administered a workforce education program that served fourteen million customers across a territory of fifty thousand square miles – by employing nearly one hundred para-professionals annually. As result of his success in this role, he accepted an invitation to serve on the 2013-14 executive board of the California Association of Work Experience Educators.
With over 20 years as an accomplished people engager, manager and educator, Mr. Fitz has become a frequently called-upon community leader, career educator and specialist. He carries a wealth of knowledge and experience having directed globally, nationally, and regionally acclaimed activities and projects in corporate, secondary, higher education, and community sectors. In 2009, he was awarded a service award of distinction by the California State Senate for his “commitment and dedication to inspiring vision and leadership excellence…” and, in 2007, was the recipient of the state and national award for Most Innovative Career Technical Instructional Program by the Association of Career Technical Education.
For the past two years, Mr. Fitz has been a school administrator overseeing a large consortium of colleges, school districts, and employers in the improvement of educational career pathways and economic growth activities across a vast territory for both John Muir Charter Schools and Victor Valley College. Prior to this role, he was Vice President for Live It Up Productions; Instructional Supervisor for the East San Gabriel Valley Regional Occupational Program (ROP); Professional Expert of Music for the Rowland Unified School District; and served on the College of Letters, Arts, and Social Sciences music faculty at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
For ten years while employed at the ROP, he contributed to program achievement by strategically leading and administering instructional programs resulting in associate’s degrees and professional certificates. In this leadership role, he reported directly to the superintendent and was responsible for directing fifty-five leadership, management, certificated and classified employees. He was also the institutional administrator of federal programs including the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) and the AmeriCorps National Service grant.
Always dedicated to giving back to the community, Mr. Fitz is a state-certified coach and adjudicator for the Miss America Scholarship Organization (the world’s largest provider of educational scholarships for young women); has appeared on the nation’s largest multi-cultural holiday show – the Emmy-nominated Los Angeles County Holiday Celebration; regularly sings with and serves on the Artists’ Council for Orange County’s Pacific Chorale; and lent his voice to civic-minded VOX Femina Los Angeles for events to benefit cancer awareness. He served as an ambassador of Edison International by actively participating in employee resource groups and on the Speakers’ Bureau for whom he made presentations and hosted information seminars. In his free time, Mr. Fitz travels domestically and internationally as a professional consultant in the areas of music, entertainment, leadership, and education.
Lawrence V. Fitz earned the Master of Education at Cambridge College, the Bachelor of Science in Business Management at University of Phoenix, and did undergraduate studies in Music Education and Music Business at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. He also holds secondary and adult education credentials for supervision and teaching in the areas of business management, performing, and fine arts. As a leader scholar, he is currently pursuing the Doctorate of Education (Ed.D.) in Leadership for Educational Justice at the University of Redlands. For more information, visit www.fitzconsulting.org.