Dorothy Stoneman is founder and president of YouthBuild USA, the national nonprofit intermediary and support center for more than 225 YouthBuild programs, and a leader in advocating for youth engagement in civil society. She is chairman of the National YouthBuild Coalition, with more than 1,000 member organizations in 43 states, Washington D.C., and the Virgin Islands.
After joining the Civil Rights movement in 1964, and prior to founding YouthBuild USA in 1990, Stoneman lived and worked for 24 years in Harlem. She was first a teacher and then director of a community-based day care center, elementary school, community development housing corporation, community service program, and a youth employment and leadership development program. She was director for 10 years of the first YouthBuild program, based in East Harlem. She has built grassroots coalitions that have succeeded in obtaining hundreds of millions of dollars of city, state, and federal funds for community-based organizations to implement programs for youth and community development in low-income neighborhoods.
Stoneman has a bachelor’s degree in history and science from Harvard University and a master’s degree in early childhood education and a doctorate of humane letters from Bank Street College of Education. She is a 1996 recipient of the prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship and was selected in 2000 by the Independent Sector as that year’s recipient of the annual John Gardner leadership award. She has received other awards from The Children’s Defense Fund, City Year, Youth Service America, Parent Magazine, and the Institute for Applied Youth Development Research. In 2007 she received the prestigious Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship from The Skoll Foundation.\
Stoneman serves as chairman of the board of directors of Youth Action Program and Homes in East Harlem, the original YouthBuild program. She was the founding co-chair of the Campaign for Youth, designed to improve policies affecting low-income youth in the United States. She served as co-chair for the first two years of the Ford Foundation’s Leaders for a Changing World selection committee and has been a member of the board of directors of Stand for Children. She has served on the board of advisors of the Forum for Youth Investment convened by Karen Pitman, the Harvard Saguaro Seminar on Civic Engagement convened by Professor Robert Putnam, the Levitan Youth Policy Network convened at Johns Hopkins University by Marion Pines, the international fellows of the Applied Developmental Science Institute at Tufts University chaired by Richard Lerner, and the steering committee for the Movement to Leave No Child Behind led by Marian Wright Edelman.
Stoneman is the author or editor of numerous practical handbooks regarding how to run independent community schools, parent-controlled day care centers, leadership development programs for youth, and YouthBuild programs.
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