User Profile

Founder and Executive Director, Families Empowered

Colleen Dippel founded Families Empowered in 2009 and is the current Executive Director. Families Empowered serves over 60,000 families in Houston, San Antonio and Austin by empowering families with tools, resources and support to engage in the growing market place of schools. She was a 1996 Teach For America corps member in Houston. In 1999, she left teaching to become the Director of District Partnerships for Project ACHIEVE, a private sector education technology start-up. In 2001 she became the Director of the KIPP School Leadership Program. There she developed a yearlong training program for school principals in various aspects of school leadership, as well as oversaw the Fisher Fellowship formal evaluation process. In 2004 she and her husband returned to Houston. She was the Director of Alumni Support for Teach For America’s Houston office before joining Aquinas as the Director of Education Initiatives. At Aquinas, she launched Families Empowered which she leads today. Colleen is a 2013 Leadership for Educational Equity - Emerging Political Leadership Fellowship alumni and a 2017 Pahara-Aspen Fellowship recipient. Colleen also served on the Advisory Board of the Rice Educational Entrepreneurship Program (REEP) at the Jones School of Business at Rice University. She holds a BA from SUNY Albany and a Masters in Ed Leadership from National Louis University. Colleen is the proud mother of a two active children.