Evelyn Aissa is State Director, New Hampshire, at the Nellie Mae Education Foundation. In this role, she provides connective leadership across New Hampshire’s public education field, working alongside community leaders, advocates, policymakers, funders, and other partners to elevate community insight, support learning, and advance coordinated strategies that strengthen public education and opportunity for NH communities.
Prior to joining Nellie Mae, she served as Executive Director of the Partnership for the Future of Learning, a national values-driven network connecting leaders across the field to advance an equitable, democratic, and high-quality public education system. She previously served as the first Executive Director of Reaching Higher New Hampshire, where she helped build the organization into a leading nonpartisan public education policy resource and led work at the intersection of policy strategy, community engagement, and public narrative.
She has over twenty years of experience spanning education, development, and health policy research and strategy, as well as nonprofit governance and management. She was the Advocacy Director for a New Hampshire-based nonprofit advancing health care reform, where she built a statewide network representing nearly 400,000 Granite Staters and helped successfully advance vital policy changes, including the expansion of Medicaid. She has also held a senior role at a Washington, DC-based political and economic consulting firm; worked in the Middle East as a political analyst and journalist; and conducted research exploring how the construct of resilience applies to human, institutional, and ecological systems. Her resilience research can be found in a number of publications, including Global Perspectives on War, Gender, and Health (Ashgate, 2010).
Evelyn has served on numerous nonprofit boards and advisory bodies, including as former Board Co-Chair of Court Appointed Special Advocates of New Hampshire. She has also held gubernatorial and state agency advisory appointments in education, health, and insurance policy. She holds a Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy from The Fletcher School at Tufts University and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Skidmore College.