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Staff

Maureen2

Maureen Conway

Executive Director, Economic Opportunities Program/Aspen Institute Director

wsi@aspeninst.org

Ms. Conway has headed up workforce research at the Aspen Institute since 1999. As director of the Workforce Strategies Initiative, she is responsible for leading a team of researchers and consultants in a variety of initiatives to identify and advance strategies that help low-income Americans gain ground in today’s labor market. Under her guidance, WSI has grown and expanded the range of its activities to support the field of sectoral employment development. Her vision has led WSI to take on new initiatives that mirror the growth and expansion of the sector approach nationally, including projects that seek to assess the value of sector work to business partners, to shed light on the ways in which sector programs support constituents in their struggles to overcome a range of personal and systemic barriers, to create a framework for and document approaches to systems change, to understand the potential for greater collaboration among community colleges and community-based organizations, and much more. Ms. Conway was named deputy director of Aspen’s Economic Opportunities Program in 2001. Her previous experience includes consulting work on issues of social exclusion and community development practice for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris and work for the U.S. Peace Corps, where she advised on the design, management, and monitoring and evaluation of the organization’s economic development programs in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. Ms. Conway is the author of numerous publications on industry-specific workforce development, including case studies, policy briefs and research reports. She also has presented findings from her research at various national and regional conferences. Ms. Conway holds an M.B.A. from Columbia University, a Master’s Degree in Regional Planning from the University of North Carolina, and a B.A. in economics and mathematics from Holy Cross College.