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Harmonious Dreams: Empowering Single Moms at Miami-Dade College

Achieving success in education and parenthood

Achieving success in education and parenthood
This film highlights the extraordinary journeys of two single mothers pursuing education and career aspirations while raising their children. Follow their inspiring stories as Mission North Star, a program at Miami-Dade College, provides essential support, enabling these resilient women to overcome challenges and create brighter futures.
Director: Lara Everly
Producer: Emily Lallouz, Mike Zunic
Cinematographer: Senda Bonnet
Editor: George Freund
Executive Producer: Melissa Panzer, Joan Lynch, Art Bilger

“Harmonious Dreams: Empowering Single Moms at Miami-Dade College” is a heartfelt documentary centered around the determined single mothers who are passionately pursuing their educational and career goals while balancing the responsibilities of motherhood. The film showcases their unwavering spirit, resilience, and dedication.

The narrative revolves around Tiara Hall, a returning student striving for early childhood education, and Ali, her seven-year-old daughter. Tiara’s decision to return to college after a decade is driven by her determination to provide a better future for Ali. This film explores the challenges she faces as a single parent and her journey towards academic success with the invaluable support of Mission North Star.

Guadalupe “Lupe” Justiniani, an international student hailing from Peru, shares her poignant journey of leaving her son behind in pursuit of her dream to study music performance at Miami-Dade College. The film captures her struggles with language barriers, homesickness, and legal issues as she strives to reunite with her child.

Throughout the documentary, Mission North Star shines as a beacon of hope for these single mothers, offering a comprehensive range of assistance, including academic support, childcare assistance, housing resources, and mental health services. The program’s dedicated staff, led by Stephanie Silva, provide unwavering guidance and motivation, ensuring these single moms stay on the path to graduation.

The documentary underscores that when single moms succeed, their children thrive as well, emphasizing the program’s focus on empowering single mothers and enabling them to create brighter futures for their families.

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Dana Beth Ardi

Executive Committee

Dana Beth Ardi, PhD, Executive Committee, is a thought leader and expert in the fields of executive search, talent management, organizational design, assessment, leadership and coaching. As an innovator in the human capital movement, Ardi creates enhanced value in companies by matching the most sought after talent with the best opportunities. Ardi coaches boards and investors on the art and science of building high caliber management teams. She provides them with the necessary skills to seek out and attract top-level management, to design the ideal organizational architectures and to deploy people against strategy. Ardi unearths the way a business works and the most effective way for people to work in them.

Ardi is an experienced business executive and senior consultant who leverages business organizational transformation through talent strategies. She uses her knowledge and experience to develop talent strategies to enhance revenue and profit contributions. She has a deep expertise in change management and organizational effectiveness and has designed and built high performance cultures. Ardi has significant experience in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, IPO’s and turnarounds.

Ardi is an expert on the multi-generational workforce. She understands the four intersecting generations of workers coming together in contemporary companies, each with their own mindsets, leadership and communications styles, values and motivations. Ardi is sought after to assist companies manage and thrive by bringing the generations together. Her book, Fall of the Alphas: How Beta Leaders Win Through Connection, Collaboration and Influence, will be published by St. Martin’s Press. The book reflects Ardi’s deep expertise in understanding organizations and our changing society. It focuses on building a winning culture, how companies must grow and evolve, and how talent influences and shapes communities of work. This is what she has coined “Corporate Anthropology.” It is a playbook on how modern companies must meet challenges – culturally, globally, digitally, across genders and generations.

Ardi is currently the Managing Director and Founder of Corporate Anthropology Advisors, LLC, a consulting company that provides human capital advisory and innovative solutions to companies building value through people. Corporate Anthropology works with organizations, their cultures, the way they grow and develop, and the people who are responsible for forming their communities of work.

Prior to her position at Corporate Anthropology Advisors, Ardi served as a Partner/Managing Director at the private equity firms CCMP Capital and JPMorgan Partners. She was a partner at Flatiron Partners, a venture capital firm working with early state companies where she pioneered the human capital role within an investment portfolio.

Ardi holds a BS from the State University of New York at Buffalo as well as a Masters degree and PhD from Boston College. She started her career as professor at the Graduate Center at Fordham University in New York.