Leaders go on to be recognized and awarded. However, Annie Holmes had already practiced and understood leadership at the crossroads of faith, culture, and service. In a household where responsibilities always came first and where her family did not seek to be recognized, she absorbed a truth that would last: one cannot only perform leadership, but it is not to be a show; leadership is to be accountable, human, and eventually, stewardship. This first grounding would later picture a career that was less conformist and more of a courageous re-imagination of the systems that often put efficiency above people and that were characterized by re-conception and even excommunication.
Over more than two decades in social impact and public leadership, she earned a reputation for identifying patterns of unfairness, unacknowledged misalignments, and untapped avenues to long-term change. Her experience includes top executive positions in national education, finance, and policy institutions, where she oversaw huge teams, multimillion-dollar budgets, and transformational equality programs that influenced systems on a scale. Nonetheless, her work repeatedly returned to a fundamental question regarding, how can effect be increased without jeopardizing humanity?
That question became a reality when she founded Elevated Labs LLC, where she is now serving as Founder. The organization represents both her personal experience and professional rigor, emphasizing education, wellness, and economic opportunity while tackling the systemic factors that influence neighborhood results. Elevated Labs, under her direction, is more than just a charity; it is a living foundation for dignity-driven, long-term transformation.
Annie Holmes’ story is one of urgency over vision, care-driven leadership, and the creation of futures in which people and purpose may live together.
Roots in Service, Vision in Action
Holmes’s leadership philosophy emerged from her upbringing in a Black family deeply rooted in faith, culture, and service. These early experiences taught her that authentic leadership extends beyond visibility, it demands responsibility, integrity, and stewardship. This foundation would prove essential as she navigated institutions that often-valued efficiency over humanity.
Rather than conforming to systems that contradicted her values, she chose a different path. She questioned the structures themselves, asking why leadership had to mean burnout, why impact had to come at the cost of well-being, and whether entirely new models could better serve communities historically left behind.
Over 25 years, she is building an impressive career in social impact, moving through roles that progressively expanded her capacity to see patterns others missed. She developed an uncanny ability to ask the questions that unlock purpose, alignment, and sustainable growth within organizations and systems.
Building the Foundation: Elevated Levels
Holmes formally launched her entrepreneurial journey with Elevated Levels Foundation in 2022, though the vision had been taking shape for years. The benefit emerged from a clear recognition: access to education, wellness, and opportunity remains deeply shaped by systems never designed with equity or wholeness in mind.
“My entrepreneurial work began with Elevated Levels, which emerged from a clear recognition that access to education, wellness, and opportunity is deeply shaped by systems many of which were never designed with equity or wholeness in mind,” she explains.
Elevated Levels became both a proving ground and a living laboratory. She worked closely with individuals, organizations, and communities to develop programs that centered dignity, cultural intelligence, and long-term sustainability. The foundation addressed social determinants of health in Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities through arts, learning, and economic development.
The experience revealed both possibilities and gaps. She recognized the need for scalable infrastructure capable of supporting liberation without relying on burnout, extraction, or crisis response the very dynamics that plague many social impact initiatives.
Scaling Impact: The Birth of Elevated Labs
In 2025, Holmes launched Elevated Labs LLC as the natural evolution of her vision. While Elevated Levels established values and community foundation, Elevated Labs provides the tools, platforms, and intellectual property required to operate at a global scale.
The company functions as a creative studio and tech incubator where strategy, technology, wellness, education, tourism, and the arts intersect. Holmes positions it as the institutional home for her work, a place where ideas cultivated through Elevated Levels can mature into systems that can be replicated, adapted, and sustained worldwide.
“Elevated Labs is not a departure from my earlier work; it is its expansion,” she emphasizes.
The studio currently develops AI-powered tools, liberation-centered curricula, wellness technologies, and cultural intellectual property. Each initiative reflects her commitment to building financially sound, culturally grounded, and structurally liberating ventures.
A Distinguished Track Record
Holmes brings formidable credentials to her entrepreneurial ventures. Her resume includes executive leadership positions at major national organizations where she consistently drove transformational changes.
As Chief Equity Officer at the Council of Chief State School Officers from 2018 to 2022, she partnered with the Board of Directors to build and implement the organization’s first internal and external equity and inclusion strategic plan. The plan gained adoption by 58-member state education leaders.
She provided executive leadership for multiple departments, contributing to the management of a $55 million annual budget. Under her guidance, the Council implemented an Anti-Racism Action Plan across 58 states and territories, resulting in 39 new state equity offices and actively influencing state-level policies and legislation in three states.
She collaborated closely with the Chief Development Officer to raise seven-figure impact grants for organizational operations and state programs. She also provided state education leaders, federal legislators, and policy stakeholders with equity-focused data strategies that created targeted programs for systematically marginalized student populations.
Prior to that role, she served as Senior Vice President of Equity, Inclusion & Human Capital at Opportunity Finance Network from 2016 to 2017. She managed teams and budgets across three departments while leading strategic implementation of national industry equity and inclusion initiatives.
Her earlier career included serving as the founding Executive Director of University Diversity and Inclusion at California Polytechnic State University, where she developed comprehensive diversity strategic plans for a university serving 20,000 students and 5,000 employees.
She holds multiple master’s degrees in education from Pennsylvania State University and completed all but dissertation requirements for a doctorate in Adult Education and Lifelong Learning. Her dissertation explored how people of color learn to navigate predominantly white workplaces, research that clearly informs her current systems-building work.
Redefining Balance and Leadership
Holmes approaches professional and personal challenges through what she calls “alignment over balance.” She learned early that sustainable leadership requires honoring the full human experience rather than compartmentalizing life into separate spheres.
“Balance, for me, is not about separation, it is about alignment,” she says. She prioritizes clarity over chaos, being deeply selective about projects, partnerships, and pace. For Holmes, rest isn’t a reward, it’s a prerequisite for sharp leadership, expanded creativity, and improved decision-making.
She has intentionally decoupled her operations from artificial constraints of urgency and conventional timelines. Instead, she views time as a fluid resource aligned with wisdom and sustainable expansion.
This philosophy extends throughout her organizations. She designs work around life rather than life around work, fully integrating her personal values, family, faith, cultural grounding, and joy into how she builds systems and leads organizations.
When challenges arise, she meets them with discernment rather than urgency. She asks better questions instead of rushing toward solutions, relying on emotional intelligence to drive her processes. This approach models leadership that remains both compassionate and uncompromising honoring boundaries while delivering excellence.
The Clarifying Impact of COVID-19
The COVID-19 pandemic served as a clarifying moment for Holmes. While working at the top levels of public policy, she witnessed firsthand how fragile existing systems truly were—and how urgently new models were needed.
Rather than merely reacting to the crisis, she reflected and redesigned her approach. The pandemic underscored the importance of adaptability, wellness, and long-term resilience over crisis management alone. Those insights directly informed her commitment to building infrastructure through Elevated Labs that could withstand future disruptions.
“That push into innovation never left my bloodstream,” Holmes reflects.
Strengths and Continuous Growth
Holmes identifies attunement as her greatest strength, the ability to read people, systems, and environments with clarity and compassion. This skill, sharpened through years of community-centered work and c-suite leadership in diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice, continues to define her approach.
People trust her because she leads with intention and follows through with care. She describes herself as visionary, disciplined, and grounded in integrity.
She openly acknowledges one learning edge: her refusal to participate in urgency-driven culture. While this challenges conventional expectations, it has taught both Holmes and those she works with the value of pacing, sustainability, and depth needed to thrive.
Recognition and Impact
Holmes’s work has earned significant recognition. She received the Profiles in Diversity Journal Diversity Leader Award three consecutive years (2019, 2020, 2021). Pennsylvania State University honored her with the Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Alumni Leadership Award in 2022. She also received the Internet 2.0 Conference Visionaries Award in 2023 and recognition as one of the Top 100 Innovators and Entrepreneurs that same year.
A Message for Aspiring Leaders
Holmes is offering straightforward advice to those seeking to create impact: “Start where you are, build with integrity, and allow your work to evolve.” She emphasizes that clarity comes through action, reflection, and courage lessons she learned directly from building Elevated Levels.
She encourages leaders to lead with discernment rather than urgency and to honor their humanity as fiercely as their ambition. “The future belongs to leaders who can think systemically, act ethically, and build structures that sustain both people and purpose,” she states.
Looking Forward
Holmes envisions Elevated Levels and Elevated Labs as complementary expressions of a singular commitment: building a future where leadership prioritizes humanity, creativity holds sacred value, and liberation becomes structural rather than aspirational.
“Liberation is not a destination, it is a daily choice. Choose alignment over exhaustion, purpose over performance, and integrity over approval. Build systems that love you back. When you honor your wholeness, success becomes sustainable and joy becomes inevitable,” she declares.
As she continues building what she calls “one liberated system at a time,” she demonstrates that transformational leadership doesn’t require self-erasure. Instead, it demands the courage to reimagine systems entirely, the discipline to build infrastructure that serves rather than extracts, and the wisdom to recognize that true liberation must be both deeply personal and globally scalable.
For Annie Holmes, the work continues not as a distant dream, but as a daily practice of architecting the conditions where people and entire communities can live fully, creatively, and freely.
