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Born and raised in the Tar Heel State, Julie Kowal is a national education policy expert on charter schools, school turnarounds, and teacher and leader quality. She comes to CarolinaCAN from the North Carolina-based education policy and consulting firm Public Impact, where she consulted and led project teams on a variety of education issues. Prior to Public Impact, Kowal served as a research assistant at the UNC Center for Civil Rights and directed an after-school writing program in 23 Washington, D.C. public elementary schools.

Her state and national education policy work is extensive. She advised the state of Tennessee when it created its Achievement School District, helped the Colorado Department of Education develop a system to address chronically failing schools, guided the development of a statewide agenda for improving teacher quality in Indiana, and served as an expert panelist for a national initia- tive to retain generation Y teachers.

Kowal has also written and published widely on topics ranging from school turnaround strategy to effective educator evaluation to innovative teacher com- pensation systems. She is a featured expert on school turnarounds for the U.S. Department of Education’s Doing What Works website, and she has led work- shops with school, district, state and federal leaders on fostering successful turnarounds.

An alumna of AmeriCorps NCCC and Public Allies DC, Kowal earned her bachelor’s degree with honors from the University of North Carolina at Ashe- ville and her law degree with honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Sarah was born and raised in a small North Carolina town, and she augmented her southern heritage while attending University of Georgia with a fierce love of SEC football, sundresses and bowties, and grits. She could occasionally be found studying history, too.

Much to the chagrin of her friends, Sarah got hooked on city life after serving as the policy intern at the New York City Charter Schools Center in the summer of 2011. She returned to The Big Apple the next year to work full-time with Students for Education Reform. There her passion grew around ensuring that every kid has an equal opportunity to pursue happiness, in part through access to great schools.

In April 2013, Sarah followed her passion to 50CAN where she serves as the finance and operations associate. 

 There may just be something in the water of Le Sueur, Minn., because several female residents there (Erin’s classmate, Beth Pollock, and Erin’s older sister, Laura, among others) transformed from small-town farm girls into global citizens. Erin is no exception, and carries in her heart pieces of Spain, Bangladesh and the other countries where she’s been fortunate enough to live and travel.

Travels aside, Erin is a seasoned nonprofit professional with seven years of experience. She most recently served as a development and marketing manager for Comunidades Latinas Unidas En Servicio, also known as CLUES, a community-based, health and human services nonprofit. At CLUES, Erin managed public engagement and raised more than $2 million, successfully expanding CLUES’ ability to reverse health disparities, combat domestic violence and end child abuse in Latino communities. And as a Fulbright Scholar in Bangladesh, Erin researched the national response to human trafficking, analyzing the human rights implications of government policies and laws. While there, she also interned at the International Organization for Migration–Bangladesh.

Erin harbors a deep passion for social justice, diversity and international understanding, and she enjoys volunteering for various causes. She currently serves as the president of the Fulbright Association–Minnesota Chapter Board of Directors, and volunteers for the Advocates for Human Rights and Fundo Brasil de Direitos Humanos (Brazil Fund for Human Rights).

Erin holds bachelor’s degrees in international relations and Spanish from Minnesota State University, Mankato. She’s fluent in English, Spanish and Bengali, and has limited working proficiency in French and Portuguese.

Janellen is a native Jersey girl who hails from the Shore (to clarify: the kind of Jersey girl who doesn’t pump her own gas—not the fist-pumping MTV Jersey Shore kind). She attended Bucknell University as an undergraduate, and after bouncing between Washington, D.C. and New Jersey for the early part of her career, she moved with her husband back to the Garden State to earn a master’s in public affairs from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School.

After her stint at Princeton she returned to DC to participate in the Presidential Management Fellowship, serving at the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Senate Finance Committee. At HHS and the Finance Committee, Janellen worked on welfare reform, youth development and early childhood issues.

Janellen then returned again to New Jersey (note the pattern here) to serve as Governor Corzine’s education policy advisor and later his director of policy.  During this time, she worked on countless education issues, including the School Funding Reform Act of 2008, the authorization of $3.9 billion for school construction funding and the implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act in New Jersey. She then spent nearly three years at the Newark Charter School Fund working to improve the number of high-quality public school options for all of Newark’s students and foster collaboration between charter schools and the district.

Now that Janellen and her family have settled in New Jersey for the long term, she’s thrilled to serve as the founding Executive Director of JerseyCAN—an appropriate next step given her long-time commitment to improving educational options for students across the state.   

Christine’s first foray into education policymaking dates back to high school, when she was elected to serve on the state department of education advisory board. In college her interest in education policy continued, coevolving with her interest in advocacy and leading her to lobby her university and the Massachusetts state legislature on college affordability issues.

After college, Christine was determined to learn the ins and outs of effective campaigning and state politics, so she worked as a political consultant for SEIU 509 and then as a legislative aide for the Massachusetts House of Representatives. While at the State House, she worked closely with the staff and members of the House Committee on Education on statewide education policy. Both experiences equipped her with skills that came in handy when she went on to be a field director for a statewide campaign to provide all Massachusetts children access to high-quality early education.

In 2006, she returned to Rhode Island, the state where her grandparents lived and where she spent part of her childhood, to fight for good governance policies as the executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island.

Christine first connected with RI-CAN through her work with the Rhode Island Mayoral Academies, RI-CAN’s trusted partner in the effort to attract, support, and scale up high-performing charter schools in the Ocean State. As RIMA’s chief strategy officer, she worked alongside the RI-CAN team to bring an Achievement First Mayoral Academy to Rhode Island, helping to raise awareness, organize parents, and ultimately give families the great school option they deserve.

She holds a bachelor’s from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a master’s in public administration from Suffolk University. She lives with her fiancée in Rhode Island.

Tim was born and raised in Eugene, Oregon, blissfully unaware of the challenges and plights that faced our country.

In 2008, after graduating from Macalester College with a degree in chemistry, Tim found a job at a paint company in his Oregon hometown. But even with stable income, secure job placement and social acceptance of his profession, Tim was unsatisfied with his professional career. Something was missing.

Looking to make a difference, Tim moved back to Minnesota and completed two years of AmeriCorps. Through that experience, he learned that our public education system does not adequately serve the children who need it most: students of color and low-income children. 

Frustrated with the scope of his impact, Tim joined MinnCAN in 2011 as the MinnCAN fellow and in 2012, was promoted to the executive assistant to Vallay Varro, then founding executive director of MinnCAN. Tim now serves as the development associate for Team Growth at 50CAN, helping launch new state campaigns that will advocate for commonsense education reform to ensure all students have access to a great school.

Lisa was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan (yep, there really is an 8 Mile). After graduating from Michigan State University with dual degrees in journalism and English, she ran a brief stint on a 2008 congressional campaign before moving to Philadelphia to teach third grade as a Teach For America corps member. Inside the classroom she came face-to-face with the achievement gap. Then when she interned on Capitol Hill during her summer vacation, she came face-to-face with the people who have the power to close it: policymakers.

Convinced that children like her students won’t get the great schools they deserve unless we make wholesale changes to our school system, she took a crash course in education policy as an intern at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute before joining 50CAN as Marc Porter Magee’s executive assistant.  Here she supports Marc and the rest of the team to help make sure the 50CAN ship sails smoothly. She is thrilled to be a part of 50CAN and to continue working on what she loves most: ensuring that each child in our country has access to a great school.

Daniel has lived in Minnesota almost his entire life.  After graduating from Gustavus Adolphus College with a degree in sociology and anthropology, Daniel joined Teach For America as a sixth-grade math teacher at Warren County Middle School in North Carolina. While there, he raised his students’ state test scores to the point of closing the achievement gap between them and their wealthier peers, an accomplishment that landed him a spot as a finalist for Teach For America’s 2008 Sue Lehmann Excellence in Teaching Award.

During his second year in the classroom, Daniel was given the “crazy” (his words) opportunity to interview with Teach For America’s Founder and CEO Wendy Kopp to be the Founding Executive Director of Teach For America – Twin Cities. After establishing the foundation for the region in 2008, the first cohort of 40 teachers began in Twin Cities classrooms in 2009, and the organization grew to 100 teachers by 2011. 

During his tenure with TFA, Daniel led a broad, bipartisan coalition of community stakeholders to push for alternative teacher certification legislation at the state capitol.  After three years, one crushing defeat, and countless late nights at the capital, the bill passed in 2011 and Daniel came to MinnCAN partly because that victory—and the fight leading up to it—convinced him of the power of advocacy in ensuring all kids get the education they deserve. 

Ruchi was born in Mumbai, India and lived there until she was a teenager. Since then, she has lived in Indiana, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Nepal and London before finally settling in the great city of New York. She became hooked on politics after day one of her AP high school government class, and (unsurprisingly) went on to earn a bachelor’s in political science from Villanova University. She spent her college senior year at the London School of Economics and Political Science delving deeper into her passion for international policies, while satisfying her endless wanderlust with travels around Europe. Fresh out of college she joined the New Site Development team at Teach For America, where she worked towards TFA expansions into Detroit, Appalachia, Seattle South Carolina, Cleveland and Cincinnati. She joined 50CAN to continue doing what she loves: exploring new corners of America to help lay the foundation for an organization that’s making a difference for kids.