Shannon “Woo” Williams-Zou, Director of the California Living Labs for Liberatory Futures in Education
Young people across California are making it unmistakably clear: the public education system as currently constructed is simply not built for the world they are inheriting. The forces around them are seismic, and while momentum for high school redesign is rising across our state, it remains deeply fragmented.
California has no shortage of isolated innovations, policy activity, or committed leaders. What is missing is the connective tissue: deep relationships across communities, explicit alignment across cross-sector efforts, a shared vision for the future of secondary education, and the kind of public demand that makes systemic transformation feel inevitable rather than optional.
To bridge this gap, the National Equity Project (NEP) is proud to officially announce the launch of The Living Labs for High School Reinvention under the leadership of our newly appointed Director, Shannon “Woo” Williams-Zou.
The Living Labs is a cross-sector, intergenerational initiative co-designed by the very communities it is meant to transform: young people, families, educators, community partners, employers, and civic leaders. Together, this ecosystem will seed radical imagination for new learning environments where young people genuinely thrive, belong, and exercise true authorship over their futures.
The Architecture of the Living Labs Ecosystem: Stem, Petals, Pollinators, and Seeds
The Living Labs is designed in three overlapping layers to cultivate new patterns of relationship, distributed power, and collaborative action across California’s education ecosystem.
The Stem: Carries nutrients to every other part of the plant. This is the Co-Lab: An intergenerational group (50/50 youth and adult system leader composition) who hold the shared vision and feed it into everything else we build.
The Petals: Open and become the bloom itself. These are our local Activation Labs, where ecosystem leaders, families, and young people test the vision together and find out what it actually looks like in practice.
The Pollinators: Carry pollen from flower to flower. These are the national thought leaders, futurists, and researchers who move between us and the wider field, cross-pollinating what we're learning here with what's happening everywhere else.
The Seeds: Are what the plant leaves behind, built to take root somewhere new. These are our knowledge products and policy recommendations, the parts that will grow into the future.
Leading with Sacred Purpose: Meet Shannon “Woo” Williams-Zou
There is perhaps no leader more uniquely prepared to cultivate this connective tissue than Shannon “Woo” Williams-Zou. Woo has served as a dedicated educator, school leader, and fierce youth advocate in the San Francisco Bay Area for nearly 30 years.
Her personal experiences with systemic racism growing up inspired a lifelong exploration of multiple pathways toward promoting love, healing, and social justice. Guided by a desire to transform oppressive systems from the inside out, Woo initially studied law and became an attorney. However, her deep commitment to humanizing conditions ultimately led her to realize that public education was the most powerful avenue to accomplish systemic liberation.
Woo’s journey spans the full landscape of the educational ecosystem, having served as a classroom teacher, instructional coach, and school principal. Driven to work toward liberation and belonging on a broader systemic level beyond the four walls of a single school building, she brought her practice to the National Equity Project. She also serves as a lecturer with the Principal Leadership Institute in UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education.
Woo holds a B.A. in English and Ethnic Studies from UC Berkeley, a J.D. from UC Law San Francisco, and her administrative credential and M.A. in Education from UC Berkeley.
Shifting the Paradigm: The Future We Want to Manifest
Under Woo’s leadership, the California Living Labs will move the field beyond superficial or symbolic "stakeholder engagement" into authentic, structural co-authorship. The initiative is set up to accomplish five outcomes across the state:
Deepen Relational Trust: Building the explicit, below the green line connectivity within our state and regional ecosystems that makes lasting change durable.
Transform Power Dynamics: Moving youth and marginalized communities from temporary guests at the adult table to actual co-designers of systemic policy and resources.
Make Meaning & Generate Futures: Creating a courageous pause to design public high school models rooted in belonging, flourishing, and the full humanity of every learner.
Weave Coherence: Merging fragmented, isolated school reforms into a unified movement with a collective purpose.
Catalyze Collaborative Action: Providing the coaching infrastructure, tools, and adult development needed to make these imagined futures real.
As an organization that has supported over 100,000 leaders across three decades, NEP knows that innovation alone is incomplete. Technology and new policy models do not transform systems or guarantee equity. People do, when they are trusted to lead and are supported with intentional processes to bridge their differences to build collective vision and power.
The future of learning is not an escapist place to occupy. All of it is the inevitable result of what we choose to do today. The Living Labs will leave seeds behind (knowledge products, policy recommendations, new ways of leading together). But seeds don’t grow because we hope they will. They grow when the conditions are right: when people trust each other, when young people hold power alongside adults, and when we make room to imagine together. That’s the soil we’re tending now. With Woo leading the Living Labs, we are putting our hands in that soil, imagining the future as a place of justice and pleasure, and we aren’t letting go.
To learn more about the California Living Labs for High School Reinvention or to explore partnership opportunities for your region, visit the National Equity Project portal or connect with our field strategy team.