Today we’d like to introduce you to LaManda Pryor.
Hi LaManda, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I was born and raised in Durham, North Carolina, as the youngest of seven children in a home where education was not just encouraged it, was expected. My father was a librarian and a grassroots community activist, and my mother was a dietitian at a local hospital. They both believed deeply in education and made sure that all seven of us understood its value.
My father’s influence, in particular, shows up in so much of the work I do today. As a librarian, he instilled in me a love of books and reading at an early age. As a community activist, he also showed me what it meant to advocate for your neighborhood, stand up for people, and be willing to do the work necessary to create change. I didn’t know it then, but I was learning some of my earliest lessons about education, leadership, and community from watching him.
I grew up attending Durham City Schools at a time when Durham had separate city and county school systems. The city schools served predominantly Black students, while the county schools were predominantly white. Growing up in that environment, I became aware of disparities in education and opportunity. As I got older and began thinking about what I wanted to do with my life, I knew I wanted to come back and serve children in communities like the one that had raised me.
My journey into education wasn’t a straight line. I attended Morris Brown College in Atlanta, Georgia, and earned my first degree outside of education. When I returned home to Durham, I was married and raising a young child, but that desire to teach was still there. I made the decision to return to college at North Carolina Central University and earn a second degree in elementary education.
That decision began what has now become nearly three decades of work in education and community service.
I began as an elementary educator and spent the first half of my career serving in Title I schools. I later became a Reading First Coach and an instructional facilitator. Literacy work felt especially meaningful because of the love of books my father had given me. I understood that teaching a child to read was about much more than academics. Reading gives children access to information, imagination, opportunity, and ultimately, choices.
As my career progressed, I realized I wanted to have an impact beyond my own classroom. I wanted to influence what happened throughout an entire school, the instruction, culture, relationships, expectations, and opportunities we created for children. That led me back to North Carolina Central University, where I earned my master’s degree in school administration and supervision and moved into school leadership.
I became an assistant principal and eventually a principal. Throughout my leadership journey, I continued to gravitate toward schools serving children and families who were navigating significant challenges. Those experiences taught me something that continues to guide my work today: you can have high expectations for people while still leading with empathy, understanding, and love. In fact, I believe we need both.
Later, I was recruited to serve as a transformation principal in a Pre-K-8 school in New York, and that experience introduced me to restorative practices. I immediately connected with the philosophy because it put language and structure around something I had believed for years, “relationships are not separate from the work; relationships are the work.” When people feel seen, heard, valued, and connected, we create stronger environments for learning, working, and growing.
During that chapter of my life, I lost my mother. It was an incredibly difficult transition, and ultimately I made the decision to return home to Durham. I later became a school leader at a local charter school, and that move introduced me to Peaceful Schools NC.
Peaceful Schools NC was providing restorative practices support at my school, and what impressed me most was their approach. They didn’t walk into our building with a predetermined solution. They took time to understand our students, families, staff, culture, and community first. That resonated with everything I had learned throughout my career.
Eventually, I went from being a principal receiving the work to becoming part of the Peaceful Schools NC team. I became a facilitator, moved into community coordination and additional leadership responsibilities, and ultimately became Director of Peaceful Schools NC.
Along the way, I also stepped into entrepreneurship and founded Pryor 2 Consulting, LLC. Through my consulting work, I have been able to bring together the different parts of my journey, education, restorative practices, school culture, youth development, professional learning, leadership, and community engagement to support schools, organizations, and communities in a broader way.
And my community work has never stopped. I remain actively involved in Durham through neighborhood and civic advocacy, youth and family initiatives, and organizations working to strengthen our community. That part of my life comes directly from what I watched growing up. My father taught me that if you care about your community, you don’t simply talk about what needs to change, you become part of changing it.
When I look at my journey today, I don’t see a collection of different jobs. I see one continuous thread.
I started as a young woman from Durham who wanted to come back home, become a teacher, and pour into children who reminded me of myself. Nearly three decades later, my classroom has gotten much bigger, but my purpose really hasn’t changed.
I still believe in education. I still believe in the power of relationships. I still believe in community. And most importantly, I still believe we have a responsibility to pour back into the people and places that poured into us.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
No, it definitely has not been a smooth road. There have been some incredible opportunities along the way, but there have also been seasons that challenged me professionally and personally and forced me to discover strength in myself that I didn’t always know I had.
One of the most difficult professional experiences came when my career took me to upstate New York. As a Black woman from the South, I thought I understood racism. What I wasn’t prepared for was how openly I would experience it in a place where I didn’t expect it.
I witnessed racial disparities in the way African American employees and sometimes students were treated, and I experienced racism personally. At one point, people posted negative comments about me on social media and called me the N-word. Remarkably, after growing up as a Black girl in the South, that was the first time in my life anyone had ever called me that word directly.
It was shocking. It was hurtful. And it was incredibly eye-opening.
That experience taught me that leadership isn’t just about your title, your education, or how well you do your job. Sometimes you can walk into a room fully qualified and still have to navigate assumptions about who you are before people ever get to know you. As a Black woman in leadership, I have had moments throughout my career when I have had to work harder to be heard, trusted, respected, or simply given the same benefit of the doubt that others received more easily.
But some of my greatest challenges weren’t professional at all.
Becoming a single mother was another major turning point in my life. I grew up in a two-parent household, so I had a certain picture in my mind of what family and adulthood were supposed to look like. When my own life didn’t follow that picture, I struggled with it.
One of my greatest fears was that somehow I was letting my daughter down.
So much of what I did during that season was centered around making sure she still had every opportunity to thrive. I was building my career, continuing my education, navigating leadership, managing a household, and trying to be present for a daughter who was developing dreams of her own.
There were practices, games, school activities, long days, career responsibilities, bills, decisions, and all of the things that come with raising a child while also trying to build a life.
And we made it.
My daughter became an athlete beginning in elementary school and continued through middle and high school. Her dedication eventually earned her the opportunity to attend college on an athletic scholarship, and today she is a successful adult building a life and career of her own. Watching the woman she has become has helped me look back at that younger version of myself with a little more grace.
I wasn’t failing her, I was showing her what perseverance looked like.
When I think about the struggles along my journey, I realize that many of them required me to learn how to navigate spaces I had never expected to navigate as a Black woman in leadership, as a single mother, and eventually as a woman rebuilding and redefining different parts of her life.
Those experiences have also shaped the way I lead. They are part of the reason relationships, empathy, belonging, and understanding people’s stories matter so much to me. I know what it feels like to walk into a space and wonder whether you truly belong there. I know what it feels like to carry responsibilities that the people around you may know nothing about.
And I know what it means to keep going anyway.
The road hasn’t always been smooth, but I wouldn’t separate the difficult parts from the woman and leader I am today. They taught me resilience, but they also taught me compassion. They taught me not to make assumptions about people’s journeys and to remember that sometimes the person who appears the strongest is carrying the most.
Most importantly, they taught me that difficult chapters don’t get to write the ending of your story.
Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Pryor 2 Consulting, LLC grew out of nearly three decades of experience in education, leadership, community engagement, and working directly with children and families. I reached a point in my career where I realized that the knowledge, relationships, and experiences I had accumulated could make an impact beyond one school, one district, or one organization. I wanted to create something that allowed me to bring all of those pieces together.
The name Pryor 2 Consulting has a very personal meaning to me. When I started the company, I started it with the vision that one day my daughter might join me. My daughter and I are extremely close, and throughout the years we have shared so many experiences and done so much together. When I envisioned the company, I didn’t just see myself, I saw the possibility of the two of us building something together. That’s where the “2” came from.
What makes that especially exciting today is that the vision I had when I named the company is beginning to come full circle. My daughter and I are now having real conversations about working together, and we are beginning to explore opportunities where we can combine our individual strengths under Pryor 2 Consulting.
For me, that’s bigger than simply growing a business. It’s about legacy. I spent many years building a career while raising my daughter and trying to create opportunities for her to thrive. Now, to be at a place in our lives where we can potentially build something together is incredibly meaningful.
That’s what I want Pryor 2 to represent, family, partnership, purpose, and the possibility of creating something that can grow beyond one person and one generation.
At its core, Pryor 2 Consulting is about helping people and organizations work better together.
I work with schools, nonprofits, community organizations, leaders, and teams to strengthen culture, relationships, engagement, and the systems that support people. Depending on what an organization needs, that can include professional development, restorative practices, school climate and culture, student leadership and mentoring, conflict resolution, family and community engagement, leadership and team development, program design, strategic planning, and facilitating important or sometimes difficult conversations.
One thing that sets my approach apart is that I don’t believe in walking into an organization with a prepackaged solution and assuming I already know what it needs. I want to understand the people first.
Who are you? Who do you serve? What’s working? Where are the disconnects? What are people experiencing that might not show up in the data? And what would meaningful improvement actually look like for your organization?
I believe sustainable change begins with relationships. People need to feel seen, heard, valued, and included in the process. Once we understand the people and the culture, we can build strategies and systems that actually fit.
That philosophy is also deeply connected to my role as Director of Peaceful Schools NC. Through Peaceful Schools, I lead and support restorative practices work with educators, schools, and communities. That work continues to reinforce something I learned long before I knew the terminology: relationships matter, and how we respond when relationships are challenged matters just as much.
Peaceful Schools NC and Pryor 2 Consulting complement one another, but they are distinct. Peaceful Schools allows me to lead deeply focused restorative practices work, while Pryor 2 Consulting gives me the opportunity to bring the full range of my experience, education, leadership, youth development, community engagement, organizational culture, facilitation, and strategy to a broader range of clients.
One of the things I am most proud of about Pryor 2 Consulting is that the business authentically reflects who I am. I didn’t create a company around a trendy concept or something I thought would sell. I built a company around work I have spent decades actually doing.
I’ve been the teacher in the classroom. I’ve coached teachers. I’ve been the principal responsible for an entire school community. I’ve worked alongside families and young people. I’ve facilitated professional learning. I’ve worked with nonprofits and community organizations. I’ve sat at community tables advocating for change. I’ve also been the person responsible for taking an idea and figuring out how to turn it into something that works.
That lived experience matters when I walk into a room.
It has taught me that organizational challenges are rarely just about programs, policies, or procedures. More often than not, somewhere underneath the challenge are people, communication, trust, relationships, expectations, belonging, and whether individuals believe their voices matter.
As Pryor 2 Consulting continues to grow, I don’t want the company placed in one small box. Education will always be part of my foundation, but the principles behind my work apply far beyond schools. Nonprofits, businesses, community organizations, and teams are asking many of the same questions: How do we create healthier cultures? How do we strengthen our teams? How do we navigate conflict? How do we engage people? And how do we create environments where people can thrive?
That’s where I believe Pryor 2 Consulting can make a difference.
When someone works with me, I don’t want them to feel like a consultant came in, delivered a presentation, collected a check, and left.
I listen. I learn your organization. I get to know your people. And then we work together to create something that fits.
That spirit of partnership is at the heart of Pryor 2 Consulting. The business began with a vision of family and legacy, but it has grown into something even larger: a commitment to helping people, organizations, and communities become stronger together.
So, before we go, how can our readers or others connect or collaborate with you? How can they support you?
There are several ways people can work with me, and I’m always open to conversations about collaboration and partnership.
Through Pryor 2 Consulting, LLC, I work with schools, nonprofits, businesses, community organizations, and teams that want to strengthen their culture, relationships, leadership, and engagement. Organizations can bring me in for professional development, workshops, strategic planning and facilitation, restorative practices, conflict resolution, youth and student leadership development, family and community engagement, or customized support based on what their organization is experiencing.
One thing I always tell people is: you don’t necessarily have to know exactly what you need before you contact me. Sometimes the first step is simply having a conversation. Tell me what’s happening in your organization, what you’re trying to accomplish, or where you’re feeling stuck, and we can determine together whether I can help.
Through my role as Director of Peaceful Schools NC, there are also opportunities for schools and organizations to partner with us around restorative practices, school climate and culture, relationship-centered practices, conflict resolution, and building stronger school communities.
Collaboration is also important to me. I’m interested in connecting with organizations and individuals doing meaningful work around education, youth development, community engagement, organizational culture, and creating healthier spaces for people. Not every relationship has to begin with a contract. Sometimes a conversation, introduction, referral, or shared idea can become the beginning of something much bigger.
People can also support my work by sharing Pryor 2 Consulting with organizations that could benefit from what I offer, inviting me to facilitate or speak, connecting me with potential partners, or simply helping expand the network of people who know this work exists.
At this stage of my career, I’m very intentional about building relationships with people and organizations that care about people and want to create meaningful change.
If you’re trying to make your school, organization, team, or community work better for the people in it, let’s have a conversation.**
Contact Info:
- Website: https://pryor2consulting.com
- Instagram: pryor2consulting
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lamandapryor1994
