She earned her first dollar at age 12 on a South Carolina farm, laying tobacco on a stringer before it was hung in a barn to cure. Decades later, the Phoenix Business Journal has named Dr. Britt one of its Most Admired Leaders of 2026 — proof, perhaps, that hard work really does pay off.
Selected from a pool of more than 160 nominees for the 17th annual recognition, the honor places Dr. Britt alongside an accomplished group of Valley executives and community builders. The process includes an independent editorial review that weighs leadership, community involvement, and professional achievement. She was celebrated at the annual Most Admired Leaders event on May 7, 2026, and featured in the Phoenix Business Journal's special publication the following day.
Dr. Britt currently serves as Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost for the Maricopa County Community College District — a role she assumed in December 2025 — while simultaneously continuing her tenure as President of Phoenix College, a position she has held since June 2022. The dual role reflects both the district's confidence in her leadership and the breadth of her capacity to serve.
Her path to this recognition is as unconventional as it is inspiring. A former foster youth, Dr. Britt experienced firsthand the challenges of navigating life's instabilities while reaching for something better. That personal history is not a footnote to her career — it is the engine of it. "With every leadership opportunity I have been afforded within the Maricopa County Community College District, my hope has been that I would make a difference for the employees within my sphere of influence and that the work we did together would positively impact our students," she said upon receiving the honor. "If that has brought a speck of admiration, I am deeply grateful."
Dr. Pam Duty, English Department Chair at Phoenix College and the colleague who nominated Dr. Britt for the award, points to a specific moment that captures the essence of her leadership. When Dr. Britt became president of Phoenix College, she identified a critical gap in support for students with foster care experience — a population she understood not from a distance, but from personal memory. Rather than treating the issue as a peripheral concern, she convened a cross-functional team of student affairs staff, faculty, and community partners to design a comprehensive response. The result was Britt's Bears, a student support program that provides monthly coaching and mentoring sessions on navigating financial aid, academic advisement, and other college processes, along with social and cultural experiences designed to build genuine belonging.
The program launched in Fall 2023 and has since grown steadily. It served an average of 75 students in its early semesters and now supports 150 students in Spring 2026. Dr. Britt used her own story to build trust with participants, while grounding the work in data, clear goals, and shared accountability. As Duty observed in her nomination, "Her leadership turned a complex challenge into an opportunity for innovation, aligning resources, people, and purpose."
That approach — grounding institutional strategy in lived experience while holding it accountable to measurable outcomes — characterizes Dr. Britt's leadership. Her more than 25 years in higher education have taken her from English faculty member and department chair to faculty senate president, dean, and vice president before she stepped into the college presidency. She holds a BA in English from Charleston Southern University, a Master's in English from Northwestern State University, and a Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration from the University of South Carolina.
Her greatest strength is simple: she inspires others by bringing joy to the workplace. But beneath that warmth is a rigorous insistence that culture and mission must align. At Phoenix College, Dr. Britt created open forums and listening sessions where faculty, staff, and students could share concerns freely — and then followed those conversations with visible action, reinforcing the trust that makes institutional change possible. She worked to dismantle silos between academic and student affairs, cross-pollinating teams to design more holistic student experiences. She normalized vulnerability alongside high expectations, and she consistently tied recognition of individual and team accomplishments back to shared purpose.
Her community engagement extends beyond campus. Dr. Britt serves on the board of the Arizona Friends of Foster Children Foundation and has partnered with organizations like the Baptist Hospitals and Health Systems (BHHS) Legacy Foundation to align college resources with community programs addressing housing, food insecurity, and wraparound student support. She speaks at educational conferences and community forums, sharing her personal story not for its own sake, but as a vehicle for a larger message about the transformative power of community colleges and the students they serve.
When asked what advice she would give to emerging leaders, Dr. Britt's answer is characteristically direct: "Your greatest responsibility is to take care of the people in your sphere of influence. Do that, and amazing results will come."
It is, in many ways, the same philosophy she developed long before any formal title — on a tobacco farm, learning at 12 years old that showing up and doing the work matters. The difference now is the scale at which she applies it, and the tens of thousands of students across the Maricopa Community College District whose lives are better for it