Our Team

  • Walter "Tone" Smith is a Community Leader/Activist. He is the current founder of The Tribe The Village Inc., a nonprofit organization committed enhancing educational and community initiatives that improve the quality of life for inner city youth and communities.

    For the past 8 years Walter has traveled with teen scholars, as well as at-risk youth to the Annual Congressional Black Caucus in Washington DC, coupled with a tour of Howard University to expose our youth to the world that awaits them. Walter's mission is to bring leadership skills, employment training, and cultural empowerment to inner city youth and the community at large.

    As a former school board member for the Township of Orange, Walter sat on several committees addressing policy improvements, fiscal responsibility, and gang awareness. With the help of concerned citizens Walter has removed illegal guns from the streets and has mediated several conflicts that ended with peaceful resolutions.

  • La’Sonja Miller is a Plainfield NJ Artist who has been developing her diverse art style from a very young age. Her mother noticed her gift and nourished it with gifts such as colored pencils, charcoal, and acrylic paints. During her Junior year of High School, she made small drawings for friends and sculptures in art class. Her art teachers always allowed her to dig deeper and create at her own free will. As the years went on, she ventured from animation and sculptures into portrait paintings. She prefers oil over acrylic for portraits and loves a good resin pour painting. As a self-taught artist her path through the creative world has led her down many roads, making her pieces unpredictable.

    In 2016 her love for art became a business as she began hosting private and public paint parties which have grown to up to 100+ attendees. She has since hosted multinational businesses like Viacom, numerous Church Organizations, The US Golf Association and so much more. Using her love of art to help organizations raise funds has become her mission. Despite her growing business she still finds time to be a Mother to her two children and Wife to her husband. In 2018 she took an oil painting class at ‘duCret School of Arts’ to help enhance her oil painting skills and entered her first show at The National Arts Program in Newark, NJ. Her style is portrait realism and abstract. The inspiration for her art comes from her emotions and dreams allowing her style to have no limits.

  • Tamara Cunningham has been a transformational and inclusive leader in higher education for over 20 years, with a special focus on strategic internationalization over the last decade. She is a champion of global education, partnerships, research, and service.

    In her previous position as the Associate Vice President for Global Initiatives at New Jersey City University (NJCU), she led the institution’s first strategic internationalization plan. International Research and Educational Partnerships, Study Abroad and Exchange, Collaborative Degree Programs, the American English Program, Visiting Student and Scholar Services and the American Council on Education’s (A.C.E.) Internationalization Lab were some of the areas that reported to Cunningham’s portfolio. During her tenure as the Senior International Officer at NJCU, the University saw an increase in international student enrollments, faculty-led study abroad opportunities and strategic international partnerships, leading the campus transformation into a more internationally diverse and culturally rich community.

    An advocate for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), Cunningham was the co-lead for A.C.E.’s Community of Practice subcommittee on the Intersections of Internationalization and DEI. Her passion for access to global education for historically marginalized populations led to Cunningham’s doctoral dissertation, currently underway, that examines access to study abroad for Black male students.

    In her new role as the inaugural Assistant Vice Chancellor-Global Initiatives at UC San Diego, Cunningham will lead her team to develop and implement the University’s strategic internationalization plan. The plan will focus on the strategic pillars outlined in the institutions A.C.E. Internationalization Lab report, which include developing collaborative structures to unify the institution’s international programs, empowering faculty and scholars to explore new modalities for international research and instruction, cultivating global learning for students, and building relationships and partnerships to further elevate UC San Diego’s brand nationally and internationally.

    Cunningham serves with various professional international organizations, and she is currently completing a doctorate in Educational Leadership at St. Peter’s University. She earned a master’s degree in Communications and Information Studies from Rutgers the State University, and a bachelor’s degree in English from NJCU.

  • Khalil was born in New Brunswick. He grew up in Somerset New Jersey raised by parents who instilled in him at an early age that “service is the rent we pay for the room here on earth”. This understanding has led him to a career in service for his community.

    He Graduated from Rutgers with a Degree in Africana Studies and a Minor in political science this path led him to political organizing for various politicians throughout new jersey. Soon after he founded Flash Forward Marketing whose goal was to engage urban communities in the political process. His role as a political organizer led him to community organizing and now union organizing in the Seattle area.

    Khalil joined the New Jersey Judiciary in 2015 where he met The Tribe The Village Founder Tone Smith. He saw the inequities in the system up close and the revolving door of defendants who were known as regulars. This label pushed him to find a way to use the current tools the system had to change the culture of the judiciary.

    Working with Tone they pushed Orange to be the first Municipal court in New Jersey to host its own expungement seminar. Partnering with Essex Newark legal services.

    This seminar showed the need within their community that they service could not be ignored. This led to the official creation of The Tribe The Village Nonprofit. A true community organization that lives up to motto “service is the rent we pay for the room here on earth”.

    Khalil currently lives in Washington State.