Robyn Russell

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT ROBYN RUSSELL

I am a public servant dedicated to making government work better for the people we serve. I believe the greatest challenges facing our country today – economic inequality, child poverty, housing insecurity, and more – must be solved by government leaders. But our institutions need reforms, and it is up to bold public leaders to advance structural reforms needed to regain the public’s trust and make government deliver for the people. I started my career in local government in Chicago and came to DC to work for Congressman Quigley, eventually becoming his Legislative Director. I left the government for several years to work in philanthropy, advocacy, and the private sector; and I am honored to now have returned as Congressman Quigley’s Chief of Staff. I left the Hill to work at the United Nations Foundation, where I traveled to more than a dozen developing countries, leading an initiative that worked with corporations with large, global supply chains, primarily of women workers, to invest in the health and well-being of their workers. I also oversaw a multi-million-dollar regranting project that coordinated advocates to the US government in support of international women’s health and rights. I served as Senior Advisor to the DC Primary Care Association, where I led an initiative to apply human-centered design to improve women’s health outcomes in D.C. Through a series of in-depth interviews with providers and low-income women, I developed and iterated a package of policy recommendations and concrete solutions.Additionally, I led a number of teams at the health care technology start-up, Unite Us, building coordinated care networks of health and social service providers to ensure our most vulnerable community members are connected with the services they need to thrive.Most recently, I worked at the Tara Health Foundation, building and leading the Diverse Investing Collective to put more capital in the hands of women and people of color to increase returns and drive economic growth.I received my Master\'s of Applied Science in Population Health Management at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and a Master’s degree in Government from Johns Hopkins.My time out of government has shown me that there is an urgent need to reinvent our government institutions; and I feel lucky to be able to contribute to the next chapter of our democracy’s story in some small way.