Dr. Danielle Moss Lee was born and raised on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and enthusiastically joins the YWCA of the City of New York after a stellar ten years as President and CEO of the Harlem Educational Activities Fund. Danielle joined HEAF in 2002 after many years of experience in education and youth and community development in the nonprofit sector. She previously served as Assistant Principal of the Grace Lutheran School, Assistant Executive Director of the Morningside Area Alliance, Director for Community and Parent Partnerships at The After-School Corporation, and Consulting Project Director of the CTY Goldman Sachs Scholars Program of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth. She has significant experience in expanding opportunities in underserved communities.
Dr. Moss Lee served on the board of the Grace Lutheran School, was co-founder and lead applicant for Sisulu-Walker Children’s Academy – Harlem Charter School (the first authorized charter school in the state of New York), and has previously served on the boards of the Dodge YMCA, Teachers College Center for Educational Outreach and Innovation Advisory Board, and the National Advisory Board of The Next Generation Venture Fund, a partnership between Johns Hopkins and Duke Universities. More recently, she served a term on the Partnership for After-School Education’s College Prep Advisory Council and the Swarthmore College Alumni Council and she is currently Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of Black Agency Executives and a member of the Teachers College 125th Anniversary Steering Committee. She was also an adjunct assistant professor of Urban Youth Policy at the CCNY Rangel Center for Public Policy. She received her B.A. in English Literature and History with a concentration in Black Studies from Swarthmore College and holds M.A. and Ed.M. degrees from Teachers College Columbia University, where she completed her doctorate in Organization and Leadership.
Blog Posts
Even though I haven't been a student or a classroom teacher in a long time, the beginning of a new school year still fills my stomach with butterflies. For me, September still signifies crisply ironed clothes, spotless new shoes, and clean loose-leaf paper in an as-yet-untarnished new binder....
Read More.I was a college student the first time I remember hearing about Juneteenth, the annual holiday established to commemorate and celebrate the emancipation of the last African chattel slaves in the United States in the state of Texas.
Read More.As we glide through the month of May, I know that many teachers and students are steadily dreaming of how to spend their summer vacations. Some will be off to sleep-away camp, some will travel to faraway places, and many others are still trying to figure it out. But for many families, the...
Read More.Late one afternoon last week, I found a student smiling a smile of sheer relief at the Harlem Educational Activities Fund (HEAF). "Only 40 days left," she grinned. She was meticulously counting down the days to the end of the school year.
I smiled to...
Read More.Let me start out by assuring readers that I'm not suggesting it takes a magical coat of arms to survive life on a predominantly white campus if you're a student of color. Over the decades, tens of thousands of students of color have been effectively and happily educated on predominantly white...
Read More.Naturally, I understand that there's no significant magic or difference in providing college planning and counseling services to students of color per se, but there are important ways to help build upon their college aspirations in the course of doing this work. A while back, several colleagues...
Read More.Middle-class families don't always realize it, but we feed our kids a steady diet of college-bound messages from the time of their infancy. At least that's been the case for my husband and me. Our daughter had her first college t-shirts before she reached six months old. The word shirt is...
Read More.In an age where classroom teachers find themselves defending their profession and their results, the discussion of race in the classroom seems like one more opportunity for the finger-pointers who seek deeper understanding about the declining academic performance of all American students.
Read More.After decades of educational attainment gains among African-American and Latino students, American educators find themselves in the midst of a major retraction of many of those gains for the students who can least afford it. In an ideal world, we'd just add curriculum to young minds and stir...
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