Every so often, Teach For America alumnae Charli Cooksey can be seen pirouetting between offices or from her office door to her desk. It’s a remnant of her childhood ballet dreams.

“I sneak in dance moves in between my work,” Cooksey said.

While dancing will always be in her soul, Cooksey makes it clear that her heart lies in helping young students by changing laws around educational guidelines. She is still turning heads only now on a much larger stage.

Cooksey’s aim is to improve the educational dreams of thousands of young children in the St. Louis area by creating pathways to better opportunities and policies through her company, WEPOWER, a multi-pronged organization. Cooksey, founder and CEO, developed her passion for the well-being of children during her time as a Teach For America corps member (2019-21) following her graduation from Prairie View A&M University in Texas.

As she began her teaching career in the corps, Cooksey noticed her middle schoolers needed more than math and science projects. They needed tools that would enable them to advance not only in school, but in life.

“It was clear that I had a group of brilliant young people who needed resources and opportunities and deserved access to a transformational educational journey,” she said. “And somebody had to get it done. So, it was to me more of an adventure than it was a challenge and more of a matter of fact, let's get it done then it was, can I do this?”

Cooksey and three other TFA corps members decided to step up, and in 2011 – their second year in the program – created an educational venture called inspireSTL, a community-based organization that helps connect underserved students with transformative college prep high schools in St. Louis.

Each year, students from area schools are selected to be included in the program, which supports the students from middle school through college by providing resources and opportunities.

What began as a simple way to help her students soon became a chance to broaden her impact.

“(It) became clear that we should offer this to as many students as possible, whether they're our students or other students,” Cooksey said. “And that's when I stepped out of the classroom and started to work on this full time and make it an actual organization.”

Cooksey said she entered TFA believing it was about changing the world one student at a time and learning how to be a great classroom teacher. While both are true, she learned that the whole educational system needs to change, a belief shared by TFA’s network of changemakers.

“A system change requires changing policies and laws and it's about power,” Cooksey said. “So, Teach For America really was a catalyst for me to see how all the dots have to be rearranged and reconnected in a way that gets at root causes.

“I know I wouldn't be on the trajectory I am on if it wasn't for my experiences in the classroom and the relationships I built through the Teach for America community and how those relationships really allowed me to go on and do a lot more work outside of the classroom.”

Cooksey’s desire for political change began in college, where she helped enact several initiatives that targeted voting rights for Blacks and young people. She also ran for a position on the school board in Waller County, Texas to ensure Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic families had a voice in public education policy decisions.

Her desire to help those communities didn’t end when she received her diploma. Cooksey’s early involvement, fueled by the 2014 death of Mike Brown in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, reached a boiling point in the ensuing months after graduation.

Losses like Brown’s have left a permanent imprint on Black and Hispanic communities. This was foremost in Cooksey’s mind.

“The work that we're doing now is really about grasping at the root and honestly dismantling century-old systems that have been built on exploitation and built and sustained by doing harm to Black and Hispanic people,” she said. “After Mike Brown's death and the Ferguson uprising, it became clear to me that the young people I was working with at inspireSTL shared the identities and the lived experiences as Brown.

“And that we couldn't direct service or program our way out of the reality we were facing ... what we were confronting was a power problem. Who has power?”

And that’s what led her to start WEPOWER, combining her educational experiences with advocacy for economic justice, equality and resilience. She recently secured more than $10 million in public funding for early childhood education, support for Black and Hispanic entrepreneurs and grow a coalition of residents and local organizations committed to establishing economically just policies. WEPOWER currently boasts 200 members.

“I wanted a space for Black and Hispanic people to dream of better futures, but not just a dream of better futures—build enough power to bring those futures to bear with a special centering of young people.”