Lena Winfree
R + W Data Consulting Co-Owner/Co-Founder
Lena Winfree is the co-founder of Rachel + Winfree Consulting, a data analytics consulting firm that provides data strategy and analytics solutions to small and mid-sized businesses. Lena is also the Vice President and co-organizer of the Nashville chapter of the Blacks In Technology Foundation. In this role, she has been responsible for launching social justice initiatives that increase digital equity and literacy for historically excluded minorities. These initiatives include a Healthcare Analytics Training Program that taught Healthcare analytics skills to employees of non-profit clinics across the state of Tennessee at no cost to the clinics. This 12-week training provided valuable upskilling to Frontline workers that care for Tennessee's most vulnerable populations amid a pandemic and impacted more than 80 Tennessee clinics. Skills taught included Advanced Excel, PowerBI, Python, and Data Visualization and storytelling. The program also included a monthly speaker series that included well-known technology leaders in the Nashville community such as Dr. Charles Apigian of the Belmont Data Collaborative, Dr. Lindsey Clark of Healthcare Bluebook, and Zach Gemignani of Juice Analytics. This initiative was launched in partnership with HCA Healthcare and included The Nashville Software School and LocalTek as training partners (75% of the program participants were women).
Lena has also launched LocalTek-Thrive, a technology education initiative that aims to diversify the tech talent pipeline by providing Nashville high school students with opportunities to receive hands-on tech education, college credit, and industry certifications that prepare them to join Nashville's rapidly growing tech workforce. This initiative currently serves over 150 students in the MNPS school district, with over 90 percent of them being minorities. The LocalTek-Thrive initiative is launched in partnership with Dell Technologies. In this 3-year pilot program, junior and senior students participate in a required course designed and facilitated by LocalTek-Thrive. This course teaches skills such as Excel, SQL, data analytics, and work skills such as social media management and digital marketing. Senior students prepare to take industry certifications such as the Oracle MySQL database administrator certification, or AWS Cloud certification. In this initiative, Lena has also partnered with Tennessee State University to provide 6 hours of college credit to participating students over the course of the school year. This program has been launched in RePublic High School, an MNPS charter school in the North Nashville area.
In addition to her business and non-profit work, Lena is an active part of the Nashville tech community. Lena dedicates her time by serving on the Women in Technology Tennessee (WiTT), the Nashville Technology Council (NTC) executive board, and the Nashville Technology Council’s Education Committee Lena has also served on the steering committee for the Nashville Analytics Summit for the past two years. Lena was awarded the “Women of Influence” (2023) for the greater Nashville area.