WOMEN WHO INSPIRE
Discover Your Purpose
TRINA CLARK JAMES EMBRACES EVOLVING CAREER
By Vi c k i B e n n i n g t o n
T
rina Clark James worked in corporate America for a top
technology company for years, but despite her success
- she had another dream.
She wanted to return to her hometown of St. Louis
and make a difference for under-resourced children, to
help give them the kind of opportunities she had been given.
Currently the regional director for NPower St. Louis, Clark feels her
position is the perfect marriage of the first two phases of her career –
technology and education.
At NPower, on the campus of Harris-Stowe State University, her job is
to oversee the expansion of programming in St. Louis. The core program,
Tech Fundamentals, is offered free to veterans and qualifying adults, aged
18 to 25, from underserved communities in the greater metropolitan area.
The program trains participants for and helps them find family-sustaining
careers in the technology field.
James herself grew up in north St. Louis, where she said it was “not the
norm” to pursue a career in technology.
“My parents exposed me to more possibilities as part of the voluntary
transfer program that took me to a well-resourced high school,” she
said. “I didn’t really know what engineering was before then. It was not a
readily available career for people who looked like me.”
After graduating from Clayton High School, where she discovered a
talent for math, she earned a bachelor’s of science degree in mechanical
engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, a master’s in the same at
Stanford University, and an MBA at University of California, Davis.
Later, while on the job, she found she was usually the only African-
American engineer, and maybe one of only two females. “The technology
workforces were normally made up of white or Asian men,” she said.
Her technology career began in San Francisco at electronics
manufacturing company Solectron, then Pinnacle Systems, before
joining Apple, Inc.
At Apple, she said her most significant technology accomplishment
was as new production program manager, overseeing new products from
design to mass production. Her first was the G4 Cube, a revolutionary
and “funky” design that Steve Jobs came up with.
“It looked like a metal cube suspended in a box,” James recalled. “I
actually have the second design build of this concept. Jobs got the first
one. It’s a great conversation piece.”
James didn’t rub shoulders with Jobs often, but said that once, she had
to ride an elevator with him, and it was terrifying. “I was at meetings he
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was in – with lots of people, but I worked with design engineers who
shared his directives,” she said. “He was so brilliant. Just to be in his
presence was awe-inspiring and intimidating.”
Her non-technology accomplishments at Apple include continued
growth within the company, taking on more leadership responsibilities,
eventually leading the test engineering group for the Americas.
But the idea of a charter school nagged at her, and in 2005, she
returned to St. Louis to set the groundwork. She brainstormed with an
Apple colleague from Africa to find a name for the future school, deciding
on Jamaa, meaning family, village and tribe in Swahili.
James completed The Broad Residency in Urban Education Program
at St. Louis Public Schools, where she oversaw the development and
implementation of strategic projects to increase the quality of education
to youth in underserved neighborhoods.
As the executive director of St. Louisans Un ited To Attract Knowledge
Is Power Program, she led efforts to secure resources for the startup and
growth of a cluster of KIPP charter schools in St. Louis.
Sponsored by University of Missouri, Jamaa Learning Center finally
opened its doors in the fall of 2011 to provide quality educational and social
services to its students and their families in north St. Louis.
“I brought along a lot of my own personal experience,” James said.
“I wanted to provide the quality education I had, but keep it in the
neighborhood.”
The three-year looping program Jamaa offered enabled students
and teachers to stay together for three grades, with no transition at the
beginning and end of school years.
But when the school’s charter was not renewed, and the doors closed
in May 2016, James was devastated - even more so because she felt such a
close bond with the students and their families.
“I left Apple especially to open a charter school, and it was very
personal to me. I felt it was my purpose,” James said. “I went through a
real grieving process when it closed.”
The school’s closing was also hard on her son, who was a founding
kindergartener at Jamaa. When James was hired at NPower four months
later, she said it was a blessing,
“I came to the realization that Jamaa was my purpose at that time,” she
said. “I feel I have found my new purpose.”
Now 45, she said her first two career phases help her meet the
demands of the third. Her professional goal is to grow NPower services
in the region, and showcase the fact that the core program achieves what