Dawn Barker Floyd is a member of the Coordinator & Director Services Team at Grand River Solutions. In addition to providing coordinator and director services to clients, Dawn serves as the Assistant Director of the Title IX and Equity Services Team at Grand River Solutions, where she assists with developing and executing the team’s goals and objectives, supervises internal teams, and mentors individual team members. As a Title IX Coordinator and Director, Dawn oversees institutional compliance, ensures a fair and equitable process, supervises and mentors staff, conducts training, reviews and revises policies, and provides support to all parties engaged in a university Title IX or equity process.

Dawn has decades of experience in higher education and law. Prior to Grand River Solutions, Dawn was the Title IX Coordinator at a small private liberal arts university and at a large public university. At both schools, Dawn was the first full-time employee overseeing Title IX compliance and was instrumental in developing and implementing a robust Title IX program. In these roles, Dawn served as the primary intake person for reports involving students and staff, conducted investigations into alleged incidents of sexual misconduct, harassment, discrimination, and retaliation, drafted policies and procedures, and facilitated university-wide educational programs and training.

Dawn was also a director of university compliance for seven years at her previous institution. In this role, Dawn provided strategic guidance and compliance support on university policies and state and federal laws and regulations impacting the institution, including the Higher Education Act, ADA/504, FERPA, NCAA, F1 and J1 visas, consumer privacy laws, Title VII, and the Clery Act. In this role, Dawn also supervised the compliance training program for all employees, which included managing an online educational portal, developing program content, and presenting educational programming and training in multiple areas of university compliance.

Between 2004 – 2014, Dawn practiced law in New York and North Carolina as a litigation associate at private law firms. While in law school, Dawn completed a concentration in Employment Equality/Inequality and interned at the City University of New York Office of the General Counsel. Prior to law school, Dawn worked in higher education in various areas of student life including residence life, new student orientation, international student advising, and student activities. Throughout her career, Dawn has presented hundreds of educational programs and training to students, parents, employees, colleagues, law enforcement administrators, lawyers, and other professionals in higher education and law. Dawn’s work has always focused on an alignment of law, regulation, and policy while centering the needs of the population she is serving with a solutions- and equity-based approach.

Dawn has also taught courses as an Adjunct Professor. From this experience, she co-authored a chapter in a book entitled Collaborating for Change: Transforming cultures to end gender-based violence in higher education, published by Oxford University Press in 2020, and co-authored a chapter in the Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace and Conflict, entitled War and Romance in 2022.

Dawn earned a J.D. from the City University of New York School of Law, an M.A. in Higher Education, and a B.A. in Political Science, from Appalachian State University. Dawn lives with her family in Hickory, North Carolina.