Who We Are

Some of my earliest memories are of my father’s workplace—a child development center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where I tagged along as a kid, sat in on classrooms, and grew up around the teachers, researchers, children, and families who were part of something much bigger than I understood at the time.

My father was a research scientist at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, where he helped design and implement the educational program for what would become the Abecedarian Project—one of the most significant longitudinal studies in early childhood education history. The children in those classrooms are my age. The research has now followed them for over fifty years, and it is still ongoing. And the questions that drove it were the dinner table conversations of my childhood.

Growing up, I absorbed a particular way of seeing the world. Our home was full of people—educators, community members, international students, and families from all walks of life. We were also members of a church deeply committed to social justice, where conversations about the rights of migrant workers and the realities of poverty were as common as anything else. I learned early on that the world is not a fair place, and that what looks like limitation from the outside is almost always something more complicated. Everyone, I came to understand, wants the best for their children but not everyone has what they need to make it happen.

That foundation stayed with me as I built my own career. I co-founded an early childhood education company with my father, led it through an acquisition by Teaching Strategies, and later served in senior leadership there—working on strategy, product development, and international expansion. I earned my MBA from UNC–Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and found myself increasingly drawn to the financial and operational infrastructure that makes mission-driven work possible. Not because the numbers were the point, but because without them, the mission doesn’t hold.

During the pandemic, I leaned into the financial side out of necessity and discovered I was good at it. I started taking on bookkeeping and accounting work for small businesses and mission-driven organizations, helping them stabilize, grow, and sustain the work they cared about. But I found myself missing something: the connection to early childhood, to the field I’d grown up in, to the providers and families and children at the center of it all.

When the opportunity to work for Policy Equity Group emerged, I had to sit with it. Coming on as a full-time staff member meant pressing the pause button on some projects. But it also meant something I hadn’t had in a while: an official seat at the table. Not as a consultant advising from the outside, but as someone embedded in the work, with the knowledge and proximity to help move things forward. At PEG, I get to do both things I love—the financial infrastructure that keeps the organization running, and the early childhood content that has always been my passion. I grew up in those classrooms at Frank Porter Graham. Now I’m at the policy table. This work has been in my bones since before I could name it.

What I want people to know is this: we have the research. We have the evidence. We know what high-quality early childhood education does for children, for families, for communities, for the economy. What we are still fighting for is the investment that makes it accessible for every child, not just those born into the “right” circumstances. That means families can go to work knowing their child is somewhere safe, supportive, and nurturing. And it means providers—the people entrusted with our most precious resource—finally receiving the salaries, benefits, and recognition their work deserves.