The Samuel D. Proctor Institute for Leadership, Equity, and Justice | GSE | Rutgers

Melissa L. Salazar

    Melissa L. Salazar, PhD Education (UC Davis), MS Food Technology (UC Davis), and BS Chemistry/Chemical Engineering (UC Berkeley).

    Melissa Salazar is the founder and CEO of ESCALA Educational Services Inc. She has over 30 years of experience as a college instructor, curriculum developer, and trainer. In her journey as an educator, she has logged over 1000 hours observing and talking to teachers about their teaching and instructing more than 15 different math, science, and education courses at four-year and two-year colleges in California and New Mexico. 

    Salazar formulated the idea for her business, ESCALA Educational Services, in 2013, after realizing the need for college teachers to learn more about the impact of culture on teaching and learning outcomes for Latinx/e and Hispanic students.  She built ESCALA from scratch, slowly and intentionally building programs without any external funding, based on what practitioners in HSIs said they needed to gain skills/learn about. ESCALA is now a thriving school of professional development that offers 5 different training programs on equity, culture, and best practices in teaching to staff, faculty, and administrators in Hispanic Serving Institutions nationwide. To date, ESCALA has delivered programming to thousands of practitioners in more than 100 two- and four-year Hispanic Serving Institutions and remains the only national organization that specializes in providing workshops for the unique context of Hispanic Serving Institutions. More than 10,000 college faculty and staff have attended ESCALA’s trainings.

    ESCALA employs 5 women of color, full-time, with a full benefits package, and also has 50% of the business revenue to employ an additional 50 subcontractors, mostly college faculty and staff of color. She intentionally runs her small business with a collectivistic culture that strives to decolonize the American workplace by setting floating holiday policies, paying employees for health and wellness, and training her team on skillsets like Non-Violent Communication strategies to keep her workplace feeling culturally responsive and healing for women and men of color.