About
Maisie Chin is the founder and principal of Versal Strategy (Versal), a consulting practice specializing in strategy, process design, facilitation, and group coaching that generates collective purpose and solution seeking.
Versal has a special focus on supporting breakthrough participation and empowering leadership development of marginalized voices, through shared visioning, critical analysis, and problem-solving that produces collective trust, direction, and practice, in service of evolving organizations, building movements, and transforming systems towards racial equity and justice.
A native Californian and first child of Chinese immigrants, Maisie is a well-trained and seasoned facilitative leader who has spent 30 years in the social justice movement dedicated to eliminating structural racism.
Versal is the next iteration of Maisie sharing and transferring capacity earned through the experience of building an organization from the ground up, which required turning the complexities of racial exclusion and solidarity building to preserve a public good, into collective strategy and movement building. Maisie invested 23 years as the co-founder and eventual founding executive director of Community Asset Development Re-defining Education (CADRE), an independent, grassroots parent organizing center in South Los Angeles, California led by Black and Latinx parents whose mission is to solidify and advance parent leadership so that all children are rightfully educated regardless of where they live. As the co-designer with parents of an innovative approach to catalyzing parent participation, Maisie simultaneously pioneered an organizational model that invests in grassroots parent leadership development long-term while capably producing groundbreaking systemic changes towards racial and educational justice. Throughout CADRE’s maturation, parent engagement and shared decision-making has remained at the root of its accomplishments.
Through CADRE Maisie co-led numerous efforts that resulted in Los Angeles being the first in the nation to successfully change school discipline policy, significantly reduce student suspensions, decriminalize schools through parent-led policy change and monitoring, and redefine parent participation in educational justice, which led to national and statewide replication. A committed movement builder, Maisie, on CADRE’s behalf, co-founded the national Dignity in Schools Campaign and one of its chapters, Dignity in Schools Campaign – California. Both continue to be thriving national and statewide alliances led by community-based leaders across 20 states and five regions in California.
Prior to opening CADRE in 2001, Maisie served for two years as program manager at Public Allies-Los Angeles, supporting the personal and professional development of young adults entering the nonprofit sector seeking to effect community-based change. This role was preceded by six years as the first staff coordinator and eventual associate director for Los Angeles Partners Advocating Student Success (LA PASS), the Los Angeles site of a national, 16-city Ford Foundation initiative focused on increasing college graduation rates through K-16 cross-system collaboration. Maisie launched and coordinated LA PASS’s projects in the Watts, South Central, and Pacoima communities of Los Angeles.
Maisie is currently a board member of the Western Center on Law and Poverty, and recently concluded a decade of board service with the Schott Foundation for Public Education, and previously with the Justice Matters Institute. Maisie is a 2018 graduate of the Pahara-Aspen Fellowship. Maisie holds a bachelor’s degree in history and a master’s degree in urban planning from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
