Biography

Born and raised in New Jersey, Teresa has been a transplant living in Washington, DC, since 1995. Her ties to DC extend even further back, as her brother is a graduate of Howard University. Howard's homecoming festivities always demanded a mandatory trip from New Jersey to Howard to partake in the festivities with family and friends.  

Service as a role in Teresa's life was instilled at birth; she comes from a long line of family accomplishment and barrier-breaking in social justice, education, and advocacy. Harris Hall, which houses the School of Social Work at Virginia Commonwealth University, is named after her father's sister Dr. Grace Harris, as is the Grace E. Harris Leadership Institute, a division of the Douglas Wilder School of Government Affairs. Another of her father's sisters, Sue Wilder, was a mathematician who was crucial to the success of the NASA space missions in the '50s and '60s; whose story was told in the 2016 film Hidden Figures. Yet another of her father's sisters, Teresa's aunt Mamye Bacote was a member of the Virginia House of Delegates from 2004 to 2016, representing the 95th District. Teresa has traced her genealogy to her enslaved paternal ancestor, Reverend Charles Coleman, who started the Piney Grove Baptist Church in 1871 in Scottsburg, Virginia. One hundred and fifty-two years later, Piney Grove Baptist Church is still in existence. 

A skilled networker and mobilizer of community resources, Teresa most recently led the tenant acquisition of her 29-unit multifamily building in Columbia Heights, ensuring low and middle-income DC residents could stay in their changing neighborhoods. While executing her duties as a Ward 1 Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner, Teresa initiated a human rights environmental justice legal action against a predatory neighborhood slumlord, resulting in an inquiry by the Office of the Attorney General. Teresa's work in social services resulted in over 75 formerly unhoused individuals moving off the streets and into self-sufficiency, maintaining long-term homes of their own. Many of these individuals remain in touch with Teresa, as she was their first source in many years of establishing trust and mutual affection. She also advocated for establishing outreach behavioral health/homeless services in the DC Public Library, which resulted in DCPL implementing permanent programming, creating employment opportunities for the DC Department of Behavioral Health trained Peer Support Specialists. Three of those peers are now full-time DCPL employees working in reentry, substance abuse, and behavioral health capacities. 

In April of 2022, Teresa collaborated with Pacyinz Lyfoung Esq., a Sustainable Economies Law Center Fellow. They were awarded a DC Oral History grant by the DC Humanities Commission to document and place in the public record the oral histories of Ward One grassroots housing activists from the nineteen seventies to present day. In October of 2022, they were awarded a grant of $40,00 from IF, A Foundation for Radical Possibilities, to provide capacity-building technical assistance with Teresa's housing cooperative in piloting a model of self-determination through a self-managed cooperative. That same month they received scholarships' from ClassCrits, a critical theory legal network, to present on their collaboration between community activist and movement lawyers at ClassCrits annual conference at the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University in Houston, Texas.  

Teresa comes to Howard University after spending two years as the Program Manager of the Lower Georgia Avenue Main Street.

A voracious reader of books and an excellent cook, Teresa is living the life of service her ancestors possessed while creating a pipeline for the next generation of activists.