Jamal “Dr. Jay” Jimerson, Ed.D.

Principal, Jimerson Leadership Lab

Executive Director of Leadership and Culture Development, North Star Partners

Dr. Jay Jimerson develops the leaders an organization already has. He coaches executive directors, CEOs, and boards, facilitates the sessions where a leadership team does its hardest work, delivers keynotes, guides boards through development and planning, and evaluates whether programs produced what they promised. All of it runs on the BENCH Leadership Model™, so a leader who meets the frame in a keynote recognizes the same architecture in a coaching session a year later.

He spent two decades inside the sector before he consulted to it. He founded Thought Partner Solutions in 2016 and built a Northeast practice serving nonprofits, foundations, municipalities, public and independent schools, and higher education, working with more than seventy partner organizations over nine years. He founded the Minority Inclusion Project in 2015 and led it for seven years, building leadership pipelines across Connecticut’s nonprofit sector and advancing dozens of leaders into senior and board seats. Before that he served as Chief Program Officer at YWCA Hartford Region, directed family economic success programs at the Connecticut Association for Human Services reaching more than twenty thousand families a year, and managed school partnerships for College Summit in New Haven’s highest need high schools. He has sat in the executive chair, carried the budget, and answered to the board, which is why the coaching starts where the work actually happens.

He holds a Doctor of Education in Educational Leadership and Organizational Innovation from Marymount University, completed in 2026. He also holds a Master of Science in Human Services from Capella University, a Master of Arts in Business Communication from Jones International University, and a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication from the University of Bridgeport. He delivers every Lab engagement himself. When an organization needs wellness or clinical support alongside the leadership work, that side runs through his wife, Nehemie Moïse Jimerson, LCSW, and her practice, Restoratively Speaking, the wellness practice of North Star Partners. She is his partner in life as well as in the work, and the name North Star Partners carries both.

The research behind the model

The framework grew out of Dr. Jay’s own doctoral research at Marymount University, which examined nonprofit diversity, equity, and inclusion leaders across the 2020 to 2025 period, and how those leaders held their values and built influence inside organizations that were changing around them. He built the model from what the research found, and he delivers it himself. Every figure the Lab publishes carries a named source.

Staying the Course · Research Brief (PDF)

North Star Partners

The Jimerson Leadership Lab is the leadership and culture practice of North Star Partners. Restoratively Speaking is the wellness and clinical practice, led by Dr. Jay’s wife, Nehemie Moïse Jimerson, LCSW, Principal, Restoratively Speaking, and Executive Director of Wellness and Clinical Practice. The two of them built North Star Partners together, as partners in the work and in life. Leadership development and coaching run through the Lab. Wellness, burnout, and clinical work run through Restoratively Speaking. When an organization needs both, one agreement at the North Star Partners level covers the work and names both practices.