Board of Directors

Dana Carroll

Dana Carroll serves as Springfield’s Child Advocate for the Every Child Promise. Dana has been with the Community Partnership of the Ozarks for nearly 15 years. She has experience with child care, early childhood education, and parent education particularly teen parents, at-risk parents, and families who are homeless. Dana is married and has five children. She and her husband have experience with children with special needs, children with challenging behaviors and fostering and adoption of children.

Vickie Dudley

Vickie Dudley serves as the Executive Director for Children’s Center of Southwest Missouri, Children’s Center, a not-for-profit child advocacy center serving twelve rural southwest Missouri counties with four locations, provides a child-focused setting for the assessment and treatment of child abuse. Previously, she held leadership positions at Cox Health and Mercy in Springfield for nearly 30 years. Notably, was her role as Director of Mission Services at Mercy where she led numerous community out reach and advocacy efforts. Dudley has a B.S in Health Promotion from Missouri State University and a Masters in Health Care Mission from Aquinas Institute of Theology.

Halley French

Halley French serves as the executive director of Systems of Care Initiative (SOCI) in Kansas City, an organization aiming to increase access to high-quality early education opportunities for working families with young children. She has more than a decade of experience in the philanthropic and nonprofit sectors, previously leading the early childhood investment strategy at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. Halley also previously worked for a nonprofit college access program and taught middle school and high school in Kansas City’s largest urban school district. She is the mother of three young children and is active in her community as the board president of the Berkley Family Involvement Program and as a Girl Scouts troop leader. Halley holds a master’s degree in education and a bachelor’s degree in psychology.

Ellie Glenn Harmon

Ellie Glenn Harmon has worked in public policy for over sixteen years. She currently is the Director of Government Relations for St. Louis Children’s Hospital. In this role, she advocates for children’s health care issues on behalf of the hospital, their providers and staff, and their patients and families in Washington, D.C. and in the Missouri and Illinois Legislatures. Prior to joining St. Louis Children’s Hospital, Harmon had served as the Director of the Office of Governmental Policy and Legislation for the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, as well as the legislative director for a Missouri state senator. Aside from Kids Win, Harmon sits on the boards of Lydia’s House and Citizens for Modern Transit. She also serves as a Legislative School teacher at Missouri Boys State and is a founding member of the Missouri Women’s Policy Network. Harmon graduated from Truman State University in 2007 with a Bachelor of Science in Political Science and received her Master of Public Affairs degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2011. She currently lives in south St. Louis City with her husband, Eric, and their adopted toy poodle, Gus.

Tracy Greever-Rice

Tracy Greever-Rice is the Co-Director of Research at the MU Center for Health Policy and serves as the Missouri KIDS COUNT Program Director for the Family and Community Trust (FACT). Prior to her current position, Tracy served as the Director at the Office of Social and Economic Data Analysis at the University of Missouri- Columbia.

Amy Hill

Amy Hill serves as the Vice President of School-Based Services at Burrell Behavioral Health.

Ken Hussey

Ken Hussey serves as the Director of Leadership and Civic Engagement for the Missouri State Alliance of YMCAs. In this role, he provides leadership to the YMCA Youth and Government programs in Missouri and Kansas, while also assisting with national YMCA youth leadership programs. With the Alliance, he works with Missouri YMCAs to advance their policy priorities at the local, state, and federal levels. Prior to his current role, Ken served as the Executive Director of the Missouri Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, a statewide association comprised of over 1,100 pediatricians and residents in Missouri. He served as the lobbyist for the chapter, advocating for children’s health issues at the State Capitol. Since 2013, Ken has served as a councilman on the Jefferson City Council. He currently chairs the Public Works and Planning Council Committee. He is active in the community, and involved with organizations such as Rotary, Chamber of Commerce, and Serve Jeff City.

Wendell Kimbrough

Wendell E. Kimbrough serves as Chief Executive Officer of St. Louis-based Area Resources for Community and Human Services (ARCHS). Wendell is the architect of ARCHS’ intermediary funding model that annually improves the lives of more than 150,000 children and their family members. ARCHS currently funds and enhances a portfolio of 30 St. Louis area education and social service programs provided at 380 locations.Through his leadership, ARCHS has achieved numerous national and regional awards including four “What’s Right With the Region” honors by FOCUS St. Louis. Wendell is noted for 40 years of for-profit and not-for-profit organizational experience including executive posts at Coca-Cola and Tropicana Products. He has served on the boards of the After School for All Partnership for St. Louis, Missouri KIDS Count, St. Louis Mayor’s Task Force on Youth and Families, and the State of Missouri Governor’s Pre-K Readiness Panel. A native of East St. Louis, IL, Wendell has an MBA from the Walter E Heller School of Business at Roosevelt University in Chicago, Illinois and a BA in Business Administration from Clark Atlanta University in Atlanta, Georgia.

Melia Neal

Melia Neal is the Director of Children, Youth, & Family Services at Community Partnership of Southeast Missouri. She is a driven, innovative leader that provides supervision and programming oversight for multiple programs. Programming includes THRIVE Youth Development, Community Mentoring with Division of Youth Services, Future Leaders, Cape Afterschool Program, Missouri Mentoring Partnership, Golden Angels, CommUnity RX, SSI/SSDI Outreach, Access, and Recovery, and Everyday Dad. Prior to her current position, Melia served as a Children’s Service Worker for the State of Missouri and as Director for Head Start. Melia is also the author of the children’s book Jory The Terror, which focuses on a child dealing with an adverse approach.

Anissa Parra-Grooms

Anissa Parra-Grooms serves a nonprofit professional in the Kansas City community, where she also resides with her husband Brent and daughter Elvira. She first and foremost became an early childhood education advocate by living the journey and finding that ECE was not abundant in Missouri. Knowing that humans who have access to early childhood education have stronger outcomes as an adult, she vowed to help be a part of the change in hopes that other families do not have to experience the frustration she did looking for quality, affordable and safe childcare.

Amanda Schneider

Amanda J. Schneider (she/her) has served as the Managing Attorney of Legal Services of Eastern Missouri’s Health Justice Initiative and Education Justice Program since approximately 2019. Amanda previously supervised LSEM’s Medical Legal Partnership from 2015-2019 where her work focused on addressing social determinants of health in the areas of Medicaid access, housing and homelessness, and education. Amanda’s expertise is in issues of education equity and attacking the school-to-prison pipeline in particular on the issues of school enrollment for students experiencing homelessness under McKinney Vento and exclusionary school discipline. Amanda began her career as the first William G. Guerri Chair Attorney in the Children’s Legal Alliance, practicing in education law by providing direct legal representation to students in the areas of school enrollment, discipline, and special education. She graduated magna cum laude from Indiana University-Bloomington with bachelor’s degrees in English Literature and Sociology, and a minor in Communication in 2001 and from Indiana University-Bloomington’s School of Law in 2006. She is a first-generation college graduate and the first in her family to graduate from law school.

Sanaria Sulaiman

Sanaria is the Executive Director of Vision for Children at Risk. She joined the organization in 2013 as director of Project LAUNCH, a federally funded program to improve young child wellness in the 63106 and 63107 ZIP codes of north St. Louis. Previously, she served for over five years with Child Care Aware of Missouri, most recently as director of training and inclusion services. She has been in the early childhood field for 15 years, and has 10 years of statewide and regional management experience in the area of social and emotional well‐being of children, families and communities, training and educating service providers, with focus on inclusive practices. She holds a bachelor’s degree in business administration and is working toward a master’s in business from Webster University.

Devon Teran

Devon has varied experience working in schools as an administrator, instructional coach and classroom teacher. He works to develop community partnerships to offer meaningful and authentic learning opportunities for students. Devon is a former UnidosUS National Institute for Latino School Leaders fellow, focusing on using federal policy to improve teacher development and retention. He is a former National Principal Fellow for Relay Graduate School of Education. Devon is also an active musician in Kansas City.

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