Solutions start with the people closest to the issues. Advancing Communities for Equity (ACE) helps social impact organizations, systems, and philanthropy learn deeply from the families and communities they serve, turn what they hear into shared plans, and collaborate to carry them out. Our work spans facilitation, strategic advising, and fractional leadership, with a particular focus on early childhood and Latino and multilingual families across Louisiana and the South.
Emmy O’Dwyer is a native New Orleanian and a first-generation American whose parents came from Honduras. That perspective, along with more than 20 years as a teacher, child care director, school administrator, nonprofit executive director, and state strategist, shapes everything Advancing Communities for Equity does: systems work better when the families they serve help shape them.
Emmy’s early childhood career began when she opened the first new early learning center in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, which had wiped out 80% of the city’s programs. As a senior strategist at the Louisiana Department of Education, she managed a portfolio of more than $20 million, overseeing statewide coaching and technical assistance, leadership development, teacher certification, mental health consultation, and site improvement for early learning centers. She launched Louisiana’s statewide shared services strategy and served as lead staff for the state’s Early Childhood Care and Education Commission, which sets Louisiana’s long-term strategy for access to quality early learning.
Emmy founded Advancing Communities for Equity in 2021. Since then, she has led the first community-engaged studies of Latino access to early learning in Jefferson, Orleans, and Lafayette parishes; designed and facilitated the first global learning convening for home-based child care leaders for the National Association for Family Child Care; served as the equity and inclusion lead for Kent County, Michigan’s evaluation of its early childhood millage; and served as interim managing director of 826 New Orleans.
Emmy is a certified facilitator and completed the Institute for the Future’s Foresight Essentials certification. She was a 2014 W.K. Kellogg Foundation Community Leadership Network fellow and a 2020 Learning Sciences Exchange fellow at New America, where she has served as an adviser. A lifelong learner, Emmy has also completed fellowships with Pritzker and the Pahara Institute. Her community leadership has earned a commendation from the mayor of New Orleans.
The community holds the answers. We listen first to the people closest to an issue, keep their voices in the room as decisions are made, and build their capacity to lead long after our work is done.
We value the contributions of all people and center the rights of children and families in everything we do.
Equity is the lens for all our work. It shapes our priorities and how we address the systemic barriers families face, including language access for multilingual families.
Data and research ground our decisions, from design to implementation to evaluation. We pair numbers with the stories behind them.
We look beneath the surface to the structures and mindsets that shape what communities experience, so solutions address root causes, not just symptoms.
We design and lead conversations that move communities, partners, and system leaders to shared decisions, from bilingual family listening sessions to a global convening of child care leaders.
We work alongside organizations to understand their landscape, apply systems thinking, and plan for improvement through research, evaluation, and coaching.
We step in as interim or fractional leaders to steady organizations through transition, align staff and board, and prepare them for what’s next.
Advancing Communities for Equity brings together a network of trusted colleagues with expertise in research, facilitation, language justice, strategy, and community engagement, assembled to fit each project. We can manage large, multi-year efforts as well as focused, one-time needs. Contact us to talk about your project and the team we’d bring to it.
