Navigating Advocacy for Meaningful Education (N.A.M.E.) is a community-rooted, Maryland-based nonprofit dedicated to ensuring families are not navigating education systems alone.
We exist to support families, particularly those raising children with disabilities, as they move through complex special education processes with clarity, confidence, and dignity.
N.A.M.E. was founded from lived experience, community relationships, and a deep understanding that advocacy is not meant to be transactional or temporary. It is meant to be shared, sustained, and passed on. Our work is grounded in the belief that when families are informed and supported, systems begin to change.
Navigating Advocacy for Meaningful Education exists to support families and communities navigating special education systems by providing clear information, trusted advocacy, and accessible education supports.
Long before Navigating Advocacy for Meaningful Education existed, special education was already part of our story. As a child, our founder watched her younger sister navigate a speech and language delay, experiencing early intervention and special education services from the family side of the table. That experience shaped an early understanding of how powerful, and how confusing, education systems can be for families. It also revealed something that would become a lifelong truth: when families are informed and supported, children thrive; when they are not, families are left to figure it out alone.
In 2016, our founder said yes to her first nonprofit role without fully understanding the weight of that yes. Over the years that followed, across classrooms, community programs, and nonprofit leadership, one thing remained constant: community. Community carried the work, offered correction and care, and created space for growth. Through mistakes, learning, and becoming, it became clear that advocacy is not something meant to be held by one person; it is something built collectively.
After stepping away from the classroom and returning fully to nonprofit work, N.A.M.E. was created in response to what families continued to name as their greatest need: clear information, trusted advocacy, and support that does not disappear when the meeting ends.
Today, Navigating Advocacy for Meaningful Education is a federally recognized 501(c)(3) nonprofit, rooted in Baltimore and serving families across Maryland. We are advocates at heart, community-centered by calling, and committed to building advocacy that outlives us: advocacy that begins early, is strengthened over time, and is carried forward by informed families and connected communities.
NAME is governed by a volunteer Board of Directors committed to the organization's mission and long-term accountability.
| Shawna R. McMillan, M.Ed. | President |
| Keionna Spears | Vice President |
| Ebone Johnson | Board of Directors |
| Chennaya Bennett | Board of Directors |
| Jordan Mitchell | Board of Directors |
Before founding NAME, Shawna served as an IEP Chair in Baltimore City Public Schools for three school years, carrying a caseload of 14 students with disabilities under a case management model, coordinating service providers, developing programs in accordance with IDEA, and chairing the meetings where families were supposed to have a voice.
She founded NAME in 2024 on a simple belief: every family deserves to understand and be heard in the process that shapes their child's education.
“I saw firsthand how often that voice got lost, not from lack of care, but from a lack of access to plain-language guidance and consistent support.”
Founder & Executive Director, NAME, Inc.
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