* UUSC (Unitarian Universalist Service Committee)
Ms. Traylor has worked to improve social and educational opportunities available to young people and communities of color for more than 25 years. Since July 1998, she has worked as a senior program officer for the Foundation for Child Development in New York City. Most recently, her work has focused on helping to develop and promote the Foundation’s PK-3 initiative: an effort, based on child development research, to bring together the developmental focus of early education with the content focus of early elementary education to improve school experiences for children.
Ms. Traylor has developed grants to analyze and improve the qualifications of teachers and to support school-level efforts to reorganize the earliest school experiences to enable children to meet challenging school standards by third grade. She has also cultivated grants to support basic and policy-relevant research to improve the circumstances of low-income children and families. She has concentrated on early care and education, child health, and income and services support so that low-income working families can nurture and support their children. She also oversees the FCD Index of Child and Youth Well-Being (CWI), which is released each March in Washington, DC.
During a ten-year stint at the William Penn Foundation in Philadelphia, she oversaw grantmaking of the foundation’s Children, Youth, and Families program. She fostered the development of a multi-million dollar, three-year regional initiative to improve child care policies and programs, and designed a major violence prevention initiative to assist community-based organizations in creating safe and secure environments for young people. She also oversaw a national grant program to improve retention and graduation rates in the sciences for underrepresented students of color in colleges and universities. She holds an undergraduate degree in economics from LaSalle University, a master’s degree in urban studies from Temple University, where she also completed doctoral coursework, and has been a recipient of a National Science Foundation fellowship.
She is immediate past president of the board of Philadelphia Citizens for Children and Youth (PCCY), board chair of Grantmakers for Children, Youth, and Families, a national organization of foundations who make grants to support children, youth, and families, and a board member of UUSC, a human rights organization.
Throughout her career, and in a variety of settings, she has been passionately devoted to helping people use knowledge to change themselves and their worlds.