Torie Weiston-Serdan is a scholar-practitioner who has dedicated over 20 years to transforming how we see, serve, and stand alongside young people. An award-winning architect of equity-focused youth work, she authored Critical Mentoring: A Practical Guide—now the essential handbook for anyone committed to liberatory practice with young people.
Her work spans multiple terrains of impact: As Chief Visionary Officer of the Youth Mentoring Action Network, she advances a global vision of youth power through mentoring, education, and wellness. Through the Center for Critical Mentoring and Youth Work, which she founded, she walks alongside community-based organizations in their youth advocacy work, specializing in preparing mentors to honor and uplift Black, Latinx, LGBTQQ, and other young people navigating systems not designed for their flourishing.
Currently, Weiston-Serdan serves as Education Equity Program Officer at the Inland Empire Community Foundation, where she stewards a portfolio dedicated to advancing educational equity across the Inland Empire region—work that grounds her scholarship in the immediate, lived realities of communities fighting for justice.
In the academy, she leads the Community Engaged Education and Social Change Program at Claremont Graduate University's School of Educational Studies, where her scholarship interrogates how youth of the global majority and other minoritized young people experience mentoring and youth development—not as passive recipients, but as knowledge-holders whose wisdom must shape the programs meant to serve them.
Her voice and vision have reached national audiences through Blavity, Forbes, Inside Philanthropy, and Philanthropy Women. She serves with intention on the Give Build Share and The California Endowment—each role a commitment to building the world our young people deserve.
