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Senior Operating Team |
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Program Team |
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Josh Griggs |
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General Counsel |
Diversity Initiatives |
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Regional Executive Directors |
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Visit our regional pages to read about our executive directors in each region |
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Wendy Kopp
Chief Executive Officer and Founder
In her senior thesis as an undergraduate student at Princeton University, Wendy Kopp outlined a plan to recruit outstanding recent college graduates to teach for two years in America's neediest urban and rural schools. Upon graduation, she founded Teach For America, a national corps that would have an important impact on the nation's education system, putting a dent in the lingering problem of educational inequality. She has spent the past 18 years developing the corps into a prestigious, highly regarded program that attracts some of the nation's brightest young men and women. Today, 5,000 corps members reach approximately 440,000 students in low-income communities across the country. They join more than 12,000 Teach For America alumni who are assuming significant leadership roles in education and social reform. These alumni are running some of the most acclaimed schools in low-income areas, advising governors and senators on education policy, and marshalling the resources of companies and law firms toward education reform.
Kopp holds honorary doctorate degrees from Mount Holyoke College, Rhodes College, Pace University, Mercy College, Smith College, Princeton University, Connecticut College, and Drew University. She is the author of One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way, and is the youngest person and the first woman to receive Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson Award, the highest honor the school confers on its undergraduate alumni. In 2006, she was named one of America's Best Leaders by U.S. News and World Report.
Matthew Kramer
President and Chief Program Officer
Matthew Kramer is responsible for Teach For America's overall performance, operations, and effectiveness. He works closely with the chief executive officer and operating committee to guide Teach For America's long-term strategy, make operating decisions (including resource allocation), and develop the optimal organizational culture. In his role as chief program officer, Kramer oversees recruitment, selection and placement, teacher preparation and ongoing support, and alumni affairs. He joined Teach For America after working at McKinsey & Company, a management consulting firm, where he was a partner and leader in the North American Financial Institutions practice. In addition to his work with insurers and asset managers, Kramer has also served nonprofit institutions focused on K-12 education. Prior to joining McKinsey, Kramer received a B.A. in economics from Harvard College.
Elisa Villanueva Beard
Chief Operating Officer
Prior to becoming chief operating officer, Elisa Villanueva Beard served as senior vice president of regional operations at Teach For America. She joined the staff as executive director of the organization's Rio Grande Valley site. During her four years as executive director, she grew the region's funding base 17 times over, created a functioning community advisory board, and oversaw a corps of teachers that more than doubled. Villanueva Beard was a 1998 Teach For America corps member who taught bilingual first and second grades in Phoenix for three years. She also served as her school's basketball coach and grade-level chair, and was a member of the school site-based committee. Villanueva Beard received a B.A. in sociology from DePauw University.
Aimée Eubanks Davis
Chief People Officer
Aimée Eubanks Davis joined Teach For America’s staff in 2002 as vice president of new site development, helping to grow the organization’s presence into Miami and Philadelphia, as well as doubling Teach For America’s presence in New York City. In 2003, Eubanks Davis moved to the regional operations team, where she managed Teach For America’s executive directors and helped ensure maximum impact in each of the organization’s 22 regions. In 2005, Eubanks Davis became the chief people officer and in this role she has overseen the organization’s staff growth from 200 to over 800 staff members; worked on the development of a comprehensive competency model for staff recruitment, selection, performance management, and learning and development; and ensured that the Human Assets team is positioned to fuel the growth and success of Teach For America through being a strategic business partner to organizational leaders and teams. Before joining Teach For America’s staff, Eubanks Davis was a program officer at The Breakthrough Collaborative (formerly Summerbridge National) and, prior to that position, she led the Summerbridge New Orleans site to become one of the most successful sites in The Breakthrough Collaborative. Eubanks Davis, a graduate of Mt. Holyoke College, was a 1995 Teach For America corps member and taught sixth grade social studies and language arts in New Orleans.
Kevin Huffman
Executive Vice President of Public Affairs
Kevin Huffman led a 30 percent compound annual growth in his seven years heading Teach For America's development efforts, raising the organization's annual operating revenue from $11.2 million to $74 million. Huffman also has managed Teach For America's federal and local government relations and policy initiatives and served as Teach For America's general counsel. Prior to joining the Teach For America staff, Huffman was an associate at Hogan & Hartson in Washington, D.C., where he practiced with the firm's Education Law group. Huffman is a graduate of Swarthmore College and New York University School of Law, where he worked on the Law Review and published an article on legal challenges to charter schools. He was a 1992 Teach For America corps member, and taught bilingual first and second grades in Houston.
Andy Kopplin
Executive Vice President of Growth Strategy and Developme
Andy Kopplin joined Teach For America in 2008 to oversee the Growth Strategy and Development team, which manages the organization’s national fundraising and expansion efforts. He competed in a special election to fill Louisiana’s sixth congressional district seat in early 2008 after serving for more than two years as founding executive director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, the agency charged with leading the state’s recovery efforts after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Under Kopplin’s leadership, the LRA developed the strategy and built the bipartisan coalitions that more than doubled congressional appropriations for Louisiana’s rebuilding, from $13 billion to $28 billion. The LRA also produced visionary community and regional rebuilding plans and led the charge for important political reforms like the state takeover of the failing New Orleans school system. Before heading the LRA, Kopplin was chief of staff to two consecutive Louisiana governors, Democrat Kathleen Babineaux Blanco and Republican M.J. “Mike” Foster, Jr. He joined Foster’s staff in 1996 as policy director, and in that role led the pioneering effort to create the state’s community college system by building a coalition of Republicans, Democrats, business, labor, educators, and students. Kopplin previously served as executive director of the Delta Service Corps, as director of Louisiana Serve, and as a research assistant for Sen. Lloyd Bentsen. He earned a B.A. from Rice University and a master’s in public policy from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, and studied for a year at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, East Africa, as a Rotary International goodwill ambassador. Kopplin was selected as a Harry S. Truman Scholar in 1986.
Miguel Rossy
Chief Finance and Infrastructure Officer
Prior to joining Teach For America, Miguel Rossy was responsible for leading the finance function and critical infrastructure growth initiatives in New York Life's Investment Management unit. Rossy brings 16 years of financial and strategic management experience from the corporate world, including incremental leadership roles at Brinker International, where he provided business strategy and financial analysis support to the company's fast-growing Mexican Division and led Brinker's company-wide strategic planning efforts. Most recently, he served as vice president and divisional CFO of Chili's, Brinker's leading brand with over 1,000 restaurants in 23 countries. Rossy earned his M.B.A. in 1995 from Columbia Business School.
Gillian Smith
Chief Marketing Officer
Gillian Smith joined Teach For America in 2007. She has some 11 years of marketing experience, most recently for the Burger King Corporation (BKC), where she served as senior director of media and interactive. Smith has been recognized as a Woman to Watch by Advertising Age (May 2006) and an Online All-Star by MediaPost (September 2006), and BKC marketing campaigns under her leadership have received a number of honors, including Cannes Golden Lions and Best Viral Advertising of 2004 (The Wall Street Journal). Prior to her work at BKC, Smith was a brand manager for Coca-Cola Company in Germany. Smith is a graduate of Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., and was a Fulbright Scholar in Germany.
Dena Blank
Vice President of Alumni Affairs
Dena Blank joined Teach For America in 2006 as deputy vice president of admissions after working as the executive director of GirlVentures, a San Francisco nonprofit organization that inspires adolescent girls to develop their strengths through outdoor education. Blank's previous positions include associate director of development for Pacific Crest Outward Bound School and program specialist at the National Economic Development and Law Center. She has also worked as an independent consultant for nonprofit organizations such as Forward Progress, Girls Incorporated, Meet the Wilderness, and Yosemite National Institutes. Blank received a bachelor's degree in political science with highest honors from Emory University and a master's degree in public policy from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She continues to serve on the advisory board of GirlVentures.
Elissa Clapp
Senior Vice President of Recruitment
Elissa Clapp has managed the recruitment team since 1999, and in the last seven years has produced 30 percent compound annual growth in the applicant pool. In 2006, she led the effort to produce the largest number of applicants and new corps members in the organization's history with 18,966 college graduates applying, yielding a corps of 2,505. She joined the staff of Teach For America after teaching ninth and tenth grade English for three years as part of the 1996 Teach For America corps in Greater New Orleans. Clapp is a graduate of Northwestern University, where she majored in history and religion and played varsity tennis for four years.
Josh Griggs
Vice President of Admissions
Josh Griggs leads the Admissions team, which manages the effort to review more than 20,000 applications to the corps each year. In his prior role as managing director of admissions, he planned and oversaw two major changes to the admissions process—the move from two to four deadlines and the addition of an applicant phone interview—and achieved the highest loan-repayment and matriculation rates in the organization’s history. Griggs joined Teach For America’s full-time staff in 2005 as a recruitment director after helping to train incoming corps members as a corps member advisor at the Philadelphia institute. A 2003 New York City corps member, he led all 33 of his students to score on or above grade level in reading and math, secured $25,000 in donated materials for his classroom, and served as leader of a team of seven fourth grade teachers. Griggs earned a B.A. from Yale University and a master’s degree in teaching from Fordham University.
Aylon Samouha
Senior Vice President of Teacher Preparation, Support, and Development
Prior to joining Teach For America, Aylon Samouha served as vice president of east operations at Score! Educational Centers, a subsidiary of Kaplan Inc. and the Washington Post Company. During his 10 years with the company, Samouha helped lead the rapid expansion of the organization from 20 to 160-plus centers nationally. In his role as vice president of center strategy, he oversaw real estate, training, leadership development, and long-term growth strategy. As regional director in the Northeast, Samouha led the expansion of inner-city centers and successfully integrated supplemental educational services into the business. Samouha earned a B.A. in English from Columbia University.
Jeff Wetzler
Senior Vice President of Teacher Preparation, Support, and Development
and Chief Learning Officer
Jeff Wetzler joined Teach For America in 2005, after working at Monitor Group, an international consulting firm, where he developed and led client engagements to advise executives on a range of strategic, organizational, and leadership issues. While at Monitor, Wetzler also led new product development initiatives and managed global training in the area of interpersonal effectiveness. Wetzler serves as vice chair of the founding board of Leadership Prep Charter School, a K-8 charter school in Brooklyn, N.Y. He earned a B.S. in psychology from Brown University and an M.A. in Adult Learning and Leadership from Teachers College, Columbia University. While at Brown, he cofounded Providence Science Outreach, a nonprofit organization that equips university students to use hands-on projects to get kids in under-resourced schools excited about science.
Tracy-Elizabeth Clay
General Counsel
Tracy-Elizabeth Clay assumed the role of general counsel at Teach For America in October 2006. In this role, Clay is responsible for meeting the legal and regulatory needs of Teach For America, including risk management and regulatory compliance. She previously served as Teach For America's first director of state and local government relations and as the founding executive director of Teach For America's Philadelphia site. Prior to her work at Teach For America, Clay was an associate with Hogan & Hartson in Washington, D.C., where she practiced in the Antitrust, Health and Privacy practice groups for four years. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, was an officer of the Law Review, and clerked for the Hon. Anne Thompson in New Jersey. She completed her undergraduate education at Stanford University with a degree in public policy, concentration in urban and regional development.
Michelle N. Bullock
Vice President of Diversity and Inclusiveness
Michelle Bullock is responsible for overseeing Teach For America’s diversity and inclusiveness efforts across the organization. She works closely with the chief executive officer to guide Teach For America’s short- and long-term strategy to foster a diverse and inclusive organization at all levels and in all operating areas. Prior to joining Teach For America, Bullock served as director of the Whitney M. Young Center for Urban Leadership at the National Urban League. During her 10-plus years with the league, Bullock oversaw learning and development efforts for more than 100 professionally staffed affiliates throughout the country, supporting more than 1,500 employees in 37 states. She managed all codified training and professional development programs, staff relations, constituent relations, and recruitment and retention strategies for the center. Bullock holds a B.A. in economics from Pace University and is currently pursuing an M.B.A. in leadership and change management.
History
Corps and Alumni
