Chris Korsmo | Executive Director
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As a first generation college graduate, Chris knows first hand the transformative power of education to lift families out of poverty. While in college, she earned a double major in education and sociology and spent the early years of her professional life teaching and coaching. For some inexplicable reason, Chris thought it would be more fun to pick fights with the man, and turned her attention to advocacy.

After fifteen years in the reproductive rights movement, Chris now considers herself a post-feminist and uses the word “girl” the way most folks use “hello.” In 2007, thought she’d used every euphemism for the reproductive system and that it was time to leave D.C. for a place where her vote counted. Her family made a cross country pilgrimage to reconnect with Chris’ roots in education. Chris values personal choice which is why she wants to build a public education system that gives students the foundation they need to make their own choices about their future. Every child should have the option for post-secondary education if they choose – and the system should be built to make that possible. Chris can get downright ornery about this.

When she is not advocating for an education system that lifts our children’s future, Chris can be found wrestling with her son, Max, chasing down her two dogs and cooking with her partner. She enjoys sports, music, travel and an occasional three-layer chocolate cake.

Frank Ordway | Deputy Director
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Frank has always been committed to community service. Over the past 23 years, he has been a managing staff or board member with domestic and international organizations focusing on sustainable economic development, strategic technology use, social services, energy, transportation, domestic violence and the environment.

The common theme throughout all this work has been empowering people. And there is no more effective way to empower people, strengthen our communities and our economy than an effective education system. This is why Frank is so dedicated to the work of the League of Education Voters.

He is currently on the board of Bellingham’s Downtown Renaissance Network and Board Chair of Stone Soup, an organization that serves women and children in rural areas of Washington State through sustainable economic development and job training programs. He also serves on two commissions for the City of Bellingham. He is also an adjunct faculty member at the Evan’s School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington.

As Project Leader for the Public Health and Technology Leadership Program at the UW, he has led technology planning and implementation projects for HIV/AIDS clinic networks in Uganda, Mozambique and Ethiopia.

He received his Masters Degree in Public Affairs from the Evans School at the University of Washington and his Bachelors in Political Science from the University of Oregon.

Frank lives in Bellingham with his wife Rachel and two children, Dylan and Olivia.

Dawn Bennett | Community Organizer
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Dawn has been an advocate for children and teenagers for most of her career. She has served as liaison for Support, Prevention, and Intervention (SPI) portion of Family and Community Engagement to African-American Families.

Dawn is dedicated to building a strong family-based approach that aids the student’s learning as well as the overall educational process. Her immense contributions and sheer determination for “at-risk” youth have made her an individual that stands out in the crowd. In 2009, Dawn was one of 50 people in the nation to win a Director’s Community Leadership Award from the U.S. Department of Justice.

Over the years, Dawn has spent endless hours providing liaison to the African-American youth and community to provide and connect with each student so that they can be an example and leader in their community. Her energy is contagious and motivates others to be engaged and get involved to make youth a priority.

Dawn was part of the 2009 Citizens’ Academy for the Seattle Division of the FBI. She also serves as an active participant in several other community outreach programs where she organizes and plans music, sporting, and cultural events for youth in the greater Seattle area.

Tania de Sa Campos
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Heather Cope | Senior Policy Analyst
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Heather experienced first-hand the educational inequity hurting many of today’s kids while teaching middle school social studies in the Bronx. A former journalist—and mostly still one at heart—she wanted to expose the problems in education and work to impact more than the students in her classroom, which lead her to an education reform think tank in Washington, D.C. While in D.C., Heather learned about national education issues, but knew real change in education would occur at the state level, bringing her back home to Washington State. Not a stranger to advocacy, Heather was a founding board member, and later co-chair, of a youth advocacy non-profit in her hometown.

Heather holds a BA in communications and political science from the University of Washington and a MS for Teachers from Pace University. When she’s not trying to save the world one K-12 system at a time, Heather enjoys immersing herself in foreign cultures (domestic and international), watching historical dramas and quoting Monty Python sketches. She also volunteers as a mentor through the state Juvenile Rehabilitation Administration and serves on the board of directors of Seattle Education Access, a non-profit providing higher education advocacy and opportunity to people struggling to overcome poverty and adversity. Still a practicing teacher, Heather routinely administers lessons on correct hyphen use to coworkers.

Michael Itti | Public Affairs Coordinator
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Michael works to empower people through technology. At LEV, he uses e-mail, social networks, and the media to help education advocates improve Washington’s public education system.

Prior to joining LEV, Michael managed a Washington State House campaign in 2004 and worked with lawmakers in Olympia as a communications specialist for two legislative sessions. He worked with committee chairs and members who made education their top priority in the Legislature. The experience illuminated the many challenges and opportunities facing Washington’s education system.

Michael is active in the Asian and Pacific Islander community. He serves on the board of the Greater Seattle Chinese Chamber of Commerce. He’s helped to bring together community and business leaders from the Chinese community of greater Seattle through cultural events and forums.

Michael spent four years exploring Washington, DC while he attended the George Washington University. He photographed prominent speakers, protests, basketball games and student life as the photo editor for the GW Hatchet. He graduated with a BA in business administration and minor in political science.

Hannah Lidman | Sr. Policy and Political Strategist
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A Northwest native, Hannah is also a second-generation policy analyst and advocate — the product of a policy advisor/economist and a public-interest lawyer. With the concepts of social justice and democracy bred into her bones, her obsession with early childhood and education policy was an inevitability. Hannah believes that our most important community rights and responsibilities are “to know” (education) and “to say” (vote). Thus, the League of Education Voters is Hannah’s nirvana.

Hannah received a Bachelor’s degree in government/American public policy from Cornell University and a Master of Public Administration from the Institute of Public Service at Seattle University. She also had the outrageously good fortune to study the British parliamentary system of government through the Hansard Scholars Programme with the London School of Economics where she also worked as a researcher for a Labour MP.

Hannah’s adventures in education began when she worked for Governor Locke as the community involvement coordinator for Washington’s Reading Corps program and continued in London while researching England’s National Literacy Hour. And her adventures have continued through research, public affairs, community engagement, and advocacy in education and early learning policy. Hannah is on the boards of the Refugee and Immigrant Family Center (RIFC) preschool, the Children’s Campaign Fund (CCF), and the WAEYC public policy committee.

When not hating and loving incrementalism in public policy, Hannah enjoys naming her pets after M*A*S*H characters (Hulahan, Trapper, Honeycut, and Hawkeye), playing softball and kickball poorly, traveling, and dabbling in foreign languages.

Lisa Macfarlane | Co-Founder
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After cutting her political teeth volunteering on school levy campaigns, Lisa has spent the last dozen years working on public education issues in Washington State.  She led the movement to pass I-728, which voters overwhelmingly approved in 2000 and then she co founded the League of Education Voters and LEV Foundation.  Lisa has worked tirelessly on Seattle’s last 7 school levy campaigns and she is the past president of Schools First, Seattle’s on-going levy committee.

Before finding her calling in the politics of school funding and school reform, Lisa spent 15 years working in the juvenile justice system in correctional, wilderness, and legal settings.  Her first job out of college was a VISTA volunteer in a maximum security juvenile correctional facility in Columbia, South Carolina.  Lisa then spent 3 years staffing wagon trains and wilderness camps for court-referred youth during which time she rode a mule across the country.  After law school in Chicago, Lisa moved to Seattle to work as a staff attorney for the Public Defender Association.  She practiced primarily in juvenile court.

Lisa’s husband, Ross, is also a recovering attorney.  They both crave outdoor adventures.  They have 2 teenagers and their former exchange student from Uzbekistan is back living with them and going to college here.

Melinda Mann | Development Director
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A native of the Northwest, Melinda has spent the last 20 years raising money for candidates, issues and organizations that make our community a better place to live every day. From the Pike Place Market Foundation, Norm Rice for Mayor, Schools First and Pro Choice Washington, she believes in the power of the disenfranchised voice and now brings now brings her experience to bear on one of the toughest issues yet — public education reform in Washington State.

With two kids in Seattle Public Schools, Melinda has been involved in the PTA for eight years and currently serves on the board of Schools First and the Community Center for Education Results, focused on bringing change to southeast Seattle and South King County schools. A former eastsider (of I-90 that is), Melinda and her family live in and love the Seward Park neighborhood where she recently finished a multi-year stint on the Audubon Seward Park Stewardship Board.

Melinda hopes to harness the optimism and hope that all kindergarten parents bring when they begin their journey in America’s public schools and ensure their dreams for their children, and for all children, come to fruition in adequately funded schools with great teaching and leadership.

Kelly Munn | State Field Director
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Kelly has been a dedicated education advocate for over ten years. She moved from San Francisco nearly twenty years ago to manage Sales training at Microsoft. When her first child was three, she decided to stay home with him and in a few years two more joined him.

As her children entered the Issaquah school system, Kelly found it impossible to watch from the sidelines. She joined the PTSA and volunteered to work on a fundraiser for her children’s school where her ideas helped raise the income above the previous year’s level. Although pleased with the results of her fundraising efforts, she quickly realized that the financial needs of the school went well beyond what they could raise at a Walk-A-Thon. The Issaquah School District had repeatedly failed to pass its bond & levy so Kelly became active in first supporting, and then co-chairing, the school bond & levy campaigns in her school district. Those campaigns were successful and brought much-needed funding to the district.

In addition to fund raising, Kelly also served as the legislative representative for her PTA. As she became more familiar with the inner mysteries of the legislature, she didn’t even know what legislative district she lived in. Kelly began to see that to really make a difference, education advocates need to speak directly to the state. Working through her local PTA, Kelly helped education advocates in her community to better understand education funding and to find their voices so they could be heard by their legislature.

Kelly’s work with the PTA on the local, district, and state level has been honored with several Golden Acorns and the rarely-awarded recognition as Outstanding Advocate in Washington State. Along the way, she also achieved the Crystal Level of Leadership in the Washington State PTA’s Leadership Academy. In her spare time, Kelly tap dances, and has belonged to a book club for over 14 years.

Jen Olson | Communications Director
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Jen is still proud to have graduated second in a class of 10 from her K-12 school in northern Minnesota. She is the first generation of her family to graduate from college and a survivor of winters in Fargo, North Dakota.

Jen attended the University of Minnesota to pursue a master’s in creative writing, and instead found the college newspaper, where she was a reporter and ran the arts & entertainment section. From Minneapolis, she migrated west back to her native state of North Dakota, where she worked as a reporter covering Native American issues, agriculture, crime, and emus and cows running amok on the county highways.

Having learned how to program blackjack games on the Apple IIe in her high school computer science class, she would eventually turn that experience into a nine-year career at Microsoft, where she planned and created websites. She also served on the board of directors for Microsoft’s LGBT employee group.

Jen has volunteered on several scholarship selection committees and has been on the board of various LGBT organizations in Seattle. She has run her own social media consulting business and is forever humbled to have worked closely with organizations that help homeless youth.

She loves the Minnesota Vikings, college hockey, running, traveling, and cheese.

George Scarola | Legislative Director
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George Scarola is the League of Education Voters Legislative Policy Director. A former teacher, George has been a citizen activist for the past 15 years on school funding measures, locally and statewide. Professionally, George has led a number of campaigns for ballot measures and candidates and worked as a senior aide to Speaker of Washington’s House of Representatives.

Kerry Cooley-Stroum | Community Organizer
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Maggie Wilkens | Youth Organizer
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Maggie joined the LEV team first as a college intern then came back full-time after graduation as our Youth Organizer.

Four years at Willamette University helped form the groundwork for Maggie’s passion for equality. Spending quality time living and learning in Chicago and Puerto Rico, as well as volunteer work with a bilingual community parent organization in Salem have fostered a burning desire for social change. As a sociology major and ethnic studies minor, Maggie believes we can untangle the roots of structural inequality through reforming one of our biggest and most important social institutions: the education system.

When she’s not standing atop her homemade soapbox in a midnight blue Snuggie©, Maggie continues to pursue her love of basketball through coaching JV girls at Ballard High School. In her spare time, she is a music enthusiast and spends a lot of time with her siblings and family.