History
Corps and Alumni
Our team
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Senior Operating Team |
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Lily Rager Executive Vice President of Growth Strategy and Development |
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 Gillian SmithChief Marketing Officer |
Program Team |
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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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National and Regional Staff Profiles |
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Read profiles of some of our national and regional staff members |
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Wendy Kopp
Chief Executive Officer and Founder
Wendy Kopp proposed the creation of Teach For America in her undergraduate senior thesis in 1989 and has spent the last 20 years working to sustain and grow the organization. In the 2009-2010 school year, some 7,300 corps members will teach in our country’s neediest communities, reaching more than 450,000 students. They join nearly 17,000 Teach For America alumni who—still in their 20s and 30s—are already assuming significant leadership roles in education and social reform. Under Kopp’s leadership, Teach For America is in the midst of an effort to grow to scale while maximizing the impact of corps members and alumni as a force for short- and long-term change. Kopp also serves as the chief executive of Teach For All, which is supporting the development of Teach For America’s model in other countries. She is the author of One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way, and holds a bachelor's degree from Princeton University, where she participated in the undergraduate program of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
Matthew Kramer
President and Chief Program Officer
As 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 University.
Senior Operating Team
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 has overseen the organization’s staff growth from 200 to close to 1,200 staff members. Additionally, she has 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
Prior to assuming leadership of the Public Affairs team, Kevin Huffman led a 34 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 $115 million in 2008. Huffman has also managed Teach For America's federal and local government relations and policy initiatives and served as Teach For America's general counsel. Before joining Teach For America’s 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.
Lily Rager
Executive Vice President of Growth Strategy and Development
Lily Rager joined Teach For America in 2009 to help fuel the financial growth of our organization on both a regional and national level. Prior to joining Teach For America, Rager worked for 14 years at the Corporate Executive Board in Washington, D.C. She started in the research group and moved into sales within a few years, rapidly expanding her scope of responsibility and regularly delivering a compound annual growth rate of 20 percent on her revenue base through client renewals and acquisition. During that time, Rager oversaw four successful new product launches, two CRM implementations and several change management efforts to scale revenue capture in an environment of rapid growth. Most recently, she served as the managing director of member services in the sales, marketing, and communications division, where she managed a team of 40 and oversaw eight different product lines. In addition to consistently producing excellent sales results, Rager also achieved impressive results with staff retention and satisfaction. Prior to joining the Corporate Executive Board, Rager earned a bachelor’s degree in Russian and markets and management from Duke University.
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 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). Under her leadership, BKC marketing campaigns 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.
Program Team
Jeffrey Brown
Interim Chief Program Officer
As interim chief program officer, Jeffrey Brown oversees the recruitment, selection, teacher preparation, and on-going support of all corps members, as well as fostering their ongoing leadership as a force for education change and their engagement with Teach For America through alumni affairs. Prior to joining Teach for America in 2009, Brown spent over a decade advising and investing in a variety of start-up organizations. During that time he also served on the boards of several nonprofit organizations focused on early childhood care and education. Brown was also a director at McKinsey & Company, spending the majority of his career in Australia and Asia. He received a B.A. in economics and mathematics from St. Olaf College and an M.B.A. from Stanford University.
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 Teach For America’s staff 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.
Steven Farr
Chief Knowledge Officer
Steven Farr, author of Teaching As Leadership: The Highly Effective Teacher’s Guide to Closing the Achievement Gap, leads Teach For America’s efforts to discern what distinguishes teachers whose students in low-income communities achieve dramatic academic growth. He joined staff as vice president of training and support in 2001 and has managed the research and development of a number of Teach For America’s training texts. He has contributed to the development of the Teaching As Leadership framework and rubric, as well as Teach For America’s online resources built around those ideas. Farr taught high school English and English as a second language as a part of the 1993 Teach For America corps in the Rio Grande Valley. Farr is a graduate of the University of Texas’s Plan II Honors program and Yale Law School.
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 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 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, Teacher Preparation, Support, and Development, and Chief Learning Officer
Jeff Wetzler joined Teach For America 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 currently serves as vice chair on the founding board of two Leadership Prep charter elementary schools in Brooklyn, NY. 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.
General Counsel
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 Honorable Anne Thompson in New Jersey. She completed her undergraduate education at Stanford University with a degree in public policy with a concentration in urban and regional development.
Diversity Initiatives
Angela Cobb
Chief Diversity Officer
Angela Cobb is responsible for guiding Teach For America’s short- and long-term strategy to foster a diverse and inclusive organization at all levels and in all operating areas. Cobb brings over fifteen years of experience in the areas of recruiting, diversity, community development, corporate philanthropy, and change management. Prior to joining Teach For America, she worked for Allstate Insurance Co., where, most recently, she directed Chicago community investments by collaborating with The Allstate Foundation and other corporate functions to strengthen support of Chicago’s cultural and civic institutions. Cobb joined Allstate in 2005 to create and lead The Allstate Foundation’s Domestic Violence Program, an initiative to create a holistic network of programs and services to empower domestic violence survivors and their advocates. Additionally, she has held the positions of business development director for Monster’s Diversity and Inclusion division and program director for the ATHENA Foundation. She has also worked in various capacities at Deloitte, an international professional services firm. Cobb holds a B.B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and an M.B.A. from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
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