Chair: Kristin Ehrgood is president & founder of Sapientis, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the quality of public education in Puerto Rico. Additionally, she is the Director of the Flamboyan Foundation, a family foundation that focuses on improving public K-12 in school time through strategic partnerships in Puerto Rico and Washington, DC. In spring 2005, Ms. Ehrgood’s work at Sapientis was recognized by Ernst & Young when she was awarded Entrepreneur of the Year in the area of Social Responsibility. Previously, Ms Ehrgood joined Teach For America and taught for three years in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Trenton, New Jersey. Ms. Ehrgood later joined the Teach For America staff as Executive Director of their New Jersey region and then as Director of New Site Development. Ms. Ehrgood is a graduate of Bucknell University and Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Vice-chair: Mieka Wick is a Director at CityBridge Foundation, in charge of Partnerships, Programs and Strategy.  Her work is focused on efforts to educate and engage other local philanthropists in DC’s education landscape and build collaborations of funders around high impact investments in K-12 education reform in Washington, DC.

Mieka’s prior experience includes three years at New Profit Inc., a Boston-based venture philanthropy fund, where she served as Investor Relations Manager, and two years as a consultant to Massachusetts’ Commissioner of Education David Driscoll on teacher quality legislation for the State of MA.  After completing her MBA, she spent two years at Reebok International working on the merger of the Reebok brand with The Adidas Group.

Mieka holds a BA from Brown University and an MBA from Babson University.  She is a Founding Board Member of DC School Reform Now and is a Member-at-Large of the Executive Board of the National Cathedral School for Girls Alumnae Association.

Treasurer: Jerry Hauser co-founded and leads The Management Center, which provides management assistance and coaching to make it easier for leaders of progressive nonprofit organizations to achieve outstanding results. Before this, Jerry served as President and CEO of the Advocacy Institute and, for seven years, as Chief Operating Officer at Teach for America. In addition, Jerry worked as a Teach for America teacher in Compton, California and as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. Jerry received his BA from Duke University and JD from Yale.

Secretary: Mary Siddall is the founder and an advisory board member of America’s Future Foundation, a network of young conservative and libertarian leaders. In a previous life she ran the Heritage Foundation’s No Excuses campaign, a national marketing effort that showcased high-performing, high-poverty schools. A mother of three, Mary currently has two school-aged children enrolled in DCPS.

Terry Goings is the president of the Local School Restructuring Team (LSRT) at Coolidge High School DC, tasked with restructing the school after it failed to meet Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP)for five consecutive years, as mandated by the No Child Left Behind Program. Two of Terry’s children also graduated from Coolidge.

Andrew Simon is the founder and president of High Five Consulting, astrategic communications, public relations and political consulting firm. He previously served as the Deputy Regional Political Director at the Republican National Committee. He is a graduate of Bates College and an MBA Candidate at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

Emily Bloomfield returned to Washington DC in 2007, following a career in public education, strategic planning, and international economics, in California and the United Kingdom.

She joined Stand for Children, an education advocacy non-profit that organizes (currently in six states) to advance initiatives promoting improved public education, as Senior Policy Advisor. She is responsible for continually updating staff and field organizers on what works in education reform and notifying and explaining key developments in national and state education policies.

Prior to Stand for Children, Emily was an architect of an integrated transformation program that dramatically improved overall educational outcomes and closed significantly the achievement gap among students of different socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District (SMMUSD). After playing a leading role in the citizen’s group which created a community-based strategic plan with Superintendent John Deasy (subsequently Superintendent of the Prince George’s County Public Schools and now at the Gates Foundation), Emily was elected a member, then Vice-President, then President of the SMMUSD Board of Education, to which she was re-elected in 2006 and on which she served in 2002-07, when she moved back to Washington DC. During that period, in which curriculum, teaching methods, student academic support, school leadership, and high school structure were all overhauled, overall student scores in math and reading rose by 33 percent, while achievement scores for African-American and Hispanic students in SMMUSD rose by an average of over 50 percent.

Emily began her profession career in Washington DC, working in international economics in the public sector management unit of the World Bank, and later as a senior research economist for LMC International in Oxford, UK, an economics consulting firm specializing in agricultural commodities and industrial raw materials. In these roles, she worked in over 25 countries on a host of economic development and public sector reform issues. Emily then worked in a series of strategic planning and marketing executive roles in Los Angeles in media and technology, for the Los Angeles Times, Carparts Technologies, CareerPath.com, and as the first Product Manager for the successful Internet start-up CitySearch (now owned by Ticketmaster). Emily also applied her skills to bringing information technology access to low income neighborhoods and children in her work for non-profit ventures Urban Technology Center and The Children’s Partnership.

Emily earned a B.A. from the University of Chicago, a Masters in Public Administration from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University, and an MPhil. in Economics from Oxford University.

Emily has been involved with the Hope Street Group, a non-partisan policy organization dedicated to an opportunity economy, since its founding in 2003. She led the development of one of its earliest policy papers, “Investing in America’s Future: Harvesting the Returns of Quality Preschool”. She has remained involved with the HSG education policy initiatives. Emily also serves as Chair of the New Leaders Circle for the International Center for Research on Women, a leading international development and research organization based in Washington DC.