About Me

Ayo Magwood, M.Sc., specializes in evidence-based, apolitical, and solutionary training on understanding and remediating structural racism. She is passionate about fostering cross-difference cooperation towards realizing equal opportunity for all. Her superpower is her ability to synthesize a wide range of research, data, primary sources, and abstract concepts and weave them into engaging narratives and diagrams.

Ayo helps healthcare systems to understand and mitigate the impacts of structural racism on health disparities. Her Structural Racism Pathways to Health Disparities framework provides a practical approach to addressing structural racism by identifying the specific pathways through which it affects group-based access to the SDOH, leading to biological and behavioral responses observed as clinical symptoms. Identifying these specific root causes and pathways is essential to successful quality improvement (QI) processes aimed at narrowing healthcare disparities, improving outcomes, and reducing costs.

She was recognized as a leading expert on social justice education in a recent Harvard Educational Review journal article. Her evidence-based ProEquity instructional framework enables educators to build a “we” identity through honest, appreciative history and civic deliberation. Some of her strategies for teaching about historical and structural racism were featured in a 2022 Psychology Today blog.

Ayo's unique approach is informed by her personal experiences as a cultural border crosser. The daughter of civil rights activists, she is African American and biracial, and grew up in Tanzania (6 years), Liberia (6 years), and Saudi Arabia (2 years). As an adult, she worked in Belgium (2 years), and in rural Mexico (5 years). She speaks near-fluent Spanish.

Ayo has a B.A. from Brown University and a M.Sc. in applied economics from Cornell University. She is a former high school educator and economic research analyst. She resides in Washington, DC with her husband and son, and enjoys writing about her family history in her spare time.

What people are saying…

  • “I continue to be astounded at the way Ayo is able to identify the deeper, underlying dynamics and root causes of her clients’ challenges. The combination of this insight and her knowledge of behavioral principles make her an inimitable problem-solver. She uses data to dismantle misconceptions and provides a framework of evidence-based strategies. She is a gift to the field!”

    – Brigid Moriarty-Guerrero, Partner, Longview Education

  • “You have an amazing ability to synthesize and explain loads of really complex and vital history *and* show how it shapes all our lives right now. I can’t thank you enough for breaking this all down for us in such a compelling way!”

    – Tom Guglielmo, historian and author of White on Arrival and Divisions

  • “Too many educational institutions engage in “call out” antiracist strategies that shut down dialogue and exacerbate racist thinking. In contrast, Magwood’s seminars enable people of different races to learn and talk about racism without blaming each other for the past. Learning how structural racism—rather than individual racists—is responsible for racial inequity today, enables white people to understand that while they didn’t personally create these systems, they are responsible for deconstructing them.”

    – Lou Bernieri, English instructor and Director of Andover Bread Loaf, Phillips Academy