Today we’d like to introduce you to Nancy Dome

Hi Nancy, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.

I co-founded Epoch Education in 2014 to provide leaders in education and business with accessible professional development to support compassionate communication efforts in pursuit of greater diversity, inclusion, and belonging.
Starting my career as a Child Care Worker, I have always had a strong desire to support those students most at risk. Realizing the education track would allow me greater flexibility and reach than the social services track, I re-educated to become a teacher and spent 10 years working in multiple capacities, ranging from classroom teacher, Mentor Teacher, and Teacher on Special Assignment in the Juvenile Court and Community Schools in San Diego. These roles allowed me to train and support teachers in becoming more culturally competent educators for the diverse population they served.

My passion for education prompted me to obtain my doctorate in 2004, which allowed me to secure a tenure track faculty position at CSUSM in the College of Education. There, I spent 7 years working with future teachers to build their capacity in the classroom with a social justice focus, building their awareness around the necessity of being culturally competent.

During that time, I coordinated a College of Education program that sought to identify racially under-represented undergraduates and support them in becoming teachers to help diversify the workforce. In 2008, I accepted a position with Pacific Educational Group as the Director of Online Programming, where I developed online professional development opportunities for individual teachers and school districts. Realizing that online would provide a greater reach, I provided hundreds of educators with an interactive and transformative curriculum that challenged and inspired them to work as advocates for their underrepresented student populations.

Today, I continue that important work at Epoch Education, whose primary charge is to provide current, accessible and transforming Professional Development that helps school districts and educational agencies throughout the country practice compassionate communication, navigate complex topics, build bridges, and work together for inclusive, impactful change. I also work with businesses by providing inspirational keynotes, individual and small group coaching sessions, and trainings on effective communication via Compassionate Dialogue throughout the US and in the UK. My personal aspirations are to do more on the motivational/inspirational speaking side of things, working with people to coach and support them in their own personal growth, while continuing to serve schools and businesses through EPOCH.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?

While the work has always been clear to me–what we do and why we do it, specifically–the rest hasn’t always been so smooth. I came to the business world with an educator perspective. My excellence and skills were rooted in acts like creating curriculum, developing different instruction techniques, and teaching. I did not, however, necessarily know how to run a business, which felt like a huge hurdle. That first year, for example, I got dinged because I didn’t know about one of the business taxes that I was required to pay. The learning curve was substantial. However, as I grew and was able to hire more people with different specialties (such as an accountant), I thrived with the right support.

There were other things I didn’t know about running a business in those early years besides taxes and reporting considerations. Being a business owner meant I needed to think like an entrepreneur. This was different because, as an educator, I never had to sell anything and had pretty low expectations when it came to my salary ceiling. So when I DID have to sell, I had no idea how to value my work in terms of what to charge. In academia, it’s almost like you’re brainwashed into those low expectations because “it’s good work, and we do it for the kids.” I’m not saying there’s no truth in that, but my experience is that when you get out of that world, it can be hard to gauge your worth in other spaces. That’s why, when I first started doing big presentations, I severely underbid my services. I grappled with this for some time. Once, when someone threw out a number that they *thought* I should be charging, I audibly gasped. “You can get it,” they said. “You’re worth it.”

They were right. I believed I was worth it, and I believed I could get it. But still, the question of SHOULD I get it rang large in my mind . . . especially if it was for a school district with limited funding. Today, I’ve learned strategies for navigating those complexities fairly for all parties, and I see that all the investments I’ve made to get me to where I am today are worth quite a lot. I have no doubt that I’m worthy of thriving and am proud of both my evolution and the evolution of EPOCH Education.

We’ve been impressed with Epoch Education, but for folks who might not be as familiar, what can you share with them about what you do and what sets you apart from others?

EPOCH Education offers school districts and companies tools, strategies, and coaching to help them become more compassionate, belonging-rich organizations. This, in turn, measurably impacts performance, whether we’re talking about increasing attendance rates in a school, for example, or decreasing employee turnover rates at a large corporation. In both examples, engagement is key, and people are more likely to engage if they feel safe, supported, and like they belong. EPOCH Education’s tools and resources, namely The RIR Protocol (TM) and Compassionate Dialogue (R), support identifying and addressing biases and deficit beliefs, provide actionable pathways for self-awareness and self-regulation, and inspire positive change intrapersonally, interpersonally, and systemically.

A huge differentiator here is EPOCH’s commitment to actionable tools. We do not speak in platitudes or at the theoretical level; we use real talk, we offer real strategies you can implement directly (and ways to practice them), and we get real results. As one of our clients put it, “I could tell this wasn’t a pre-packaged thing with Nancy and the team, a do-a-presentation-and-forget-about-it kind of thing. We vetted 3 agencies before we chose EPOCH Ed because we wanted someone to stand by us and help us actually do the work after the audit.”

Contact Info:

• Website: https://epocheducation.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/epocheducation/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EpochEducation
• Twitter: https://x.com/epocheducation?mx=2
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfgSEE5Hz5TZgEPEgfT8ucg
• Other: https://drnancydome.com/