What brought you to Shine Early Learning?

What brought me to Shine Early Learning was the opportunity to have positive impact at scale for children and families, particularly those who are furthest from opportunity. I had the opportunity to go to graduate school at the University of Chicago, where the Nobel-winning economist Jim Heckman is a professor. His work demonstrating that high-quality early learning had the highest return of any public investment really spoke to me. Prior to coming to Shine, I spent over a decade advocating for increased investments in early learning, both because it is the right thing to do for children and families and because it is a smart investment in the future of our communities and our nation. Working at Shine Early Learning is the next chapter for me to contribute to the promise of high-quality early learning for all children.

What do you find meaningful about the work that you do with Shine Early Learning?

Our vision, mission, and values infuse everything that we do and are actively referenced and acted on regularly. Getting to work every day to enact our vision, to support “children becoming champions of their own making; where historical biases and systemic inequities no longer stand in the way of their infinite promise” is inspiring and truly an honor. And I also find meaningful how Shine works hard to live into our organizational values, including transparent and open communications, dismantling inequities, and caring teams and communities. These values are not destinations; we will never arrive at them. Our work on them will never be finished, but they are essential guideposts for how we want to work together as a team in support of the children, families, and providers that we serve.

What is something people may not know about Shine Early Learning that you would like to share with them?

It is important that our partners, particularly our public sector partners, understand that Shine Early Learning emerged from Acelero Learning and that we are part of a larger organization that provides high-quality early learning to thousands of children and families on a daily basis in our centers. Our organization does not only work at the policy level or provide technical assistance. At our core, we are early learning providers ourselves. This gives us practical insights into the challenges and realities of providing high-quality early learning, and it grounds our coaching, technical assistance, training, and content development in high-quality practices.