Wana L. Duhart
Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Wana was born in Little Rock, Arkansas where she attended the Little Rock public schools and graduated with Honors from Little Rock Central High School where she was voted “Most Likely to Succeed.” She earned her BBA in Accounting with Honors from Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. While at SMU, she joined Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. and was a member of Beta Alpha Psi, the accounting honor society. As an accounting major, she worked as a research assistant, accounting tutor, and as an intern at ARCO Oil & Gas Company. Upon graduation from SMU, she accepted a position as a staff auditor in the Dallas, Texas office of Arthur Young which was later merged with Ernst & Whinney to form the current Ernst & Young accounting firm.

After working a few years as an auditor in public accounting and earning her CPA, Wana left to pursue her MBA at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. While a graduate student at Wharton, she chaired the Wharton Speakers Bureau which allowed her to interact and dialogue with high school students in the west Philadelphia community. Subsequent to earning her MBA in Finance and Strategic Planning, she worked as an Assistant Vice President for Citicorp Investment Services in New York City.

She resigned from Citicorp to attend The Divinity School of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. While at Harvard, she focused on coursework and fieldwork that explored the church and community development, religion and public policy, social entrepreneurship, nonprofit management, and democracy and public life. She also participated in a semester-long internship in Washington, DC which included dialoguing with public policy, lobbying, and service program officers who are affiliated with communities of faith. Her Divinity School experience culminated with a thesis focusing on the utilization of cross-sectoral collaboration as a means of strengthening communities across sectors and barriers, and responding to economic, social, and public needs.

Concurrent with her Divinity School tenure, she launched Trahud Enterprises in an attempt to begin to concretize her philosophy and views about public school transformation – how to enable innovation, creativity, and flexibility in public schooling, with the ultimate goal being high quality public education. The early work of Trahud Enterprises focused on charter school development. After Divinity School, she relocated to Atlanta where she began to work alongside practitioners in private education, which provided opportunities to compare and contrast “best practices” at the elementary and secondary levels.

Her book, A Call to the Village: Retooling Public Schools is a culmination of her experiences across professions and sectors. She currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia, USA where she serves as the CEO of Trahud Enterprises (www.trahud.com). She complements her consulting work with media appearances, lectures, seminars, speaking engagements, and various other public formats.