Board of Directors, Education Voters of America

Dan Leeds, Board Chair

Daniel Leeds chairs Education Voters of America and Education Voters Institute, a non profit sister organization. Dan is the President of Fulcrum Investments LLC, a private investment firm. Until the sale of CMP Media in1999, Dan was President of International Publishing and a member of the Office of the President. CMP, a leading media company, publishes titles such as InformationWeek, Computer Reseller News and Electronic Engineering Times. The company was cited as “One of the Best Companies to Work For” by Fortune Magazine and Working Women Magazine.

Since moving to Washington in 1999, Dan has been active in civic affairs, with a particular interest in education and public policy development. Dan chairs the Alliance for Excellent Education, a national policy and advocacy organization that works to transform high schools so that every child graduates prepared for postsecondary education and success in life. He is on the Board of the Teachers Institute of Washington, DC. He is a member of the Dean’s Advisory Board for the MIT Sloan School of Management, a member of the Brookings Institution’s Business Council and an Advisory Board member of the Brookings Institution’s Center for the United States and Europe. With his wife, Sunita, he co-chairs the Enfranchisement Foundation, which works with charities to develop programs that can help break the cycle of poverty and ignorance.

Dan earned a Master’s Degree from the MIT Sloan School of Management as a Sloan Fellow and a BS in Engineering and a BA in Economics from Cornell University.

Deepak Bhargava, Board Member

Deepak Bhargava is the executive director of nonprofit Center for Community Change. Under his five year tenure, the center has seen a significant increase in funding. For 40 years, the Center for Community Change has helped thousands of urban and rural communities nationwide to organize for positive change by uniting low-income people across lines of race, ethnicity, geography and gender to equip them with the tools to change public policies and demand public attention for issues of social and economic justice.

Prior to his appointment as the executive director, Deepak served as the director of public policy for seven years at the Center for Community Change. In that capacity, he worked on housing, budget, tax, immigration, welfare, and other issues affecting low-income people. He also directed the Center’s National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support, a coalition of grassroots groups established in 2000 to give low-income people a voice in the reauthorization of the federal welfare law and other areas critical to poor people. Prior to joining the center, Deepak was the legislative director at the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), where he gained broad experience in community reinvestment and housing finance issues.

Born in Mysore, India, Deepak’s family immigrated to the United States when he was a child. He grew up in New York City and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University. Deepak’s vision is to spark an enduring movement for social change and assure that the voice of the poor is an integral part of the national dialog.

Greg Jobin-Leeds, Vice Chair

Greg Jobin-Leeds is Vice Chair of Education Voters. He has made a career of launching and nurturing successful, high-impact public policy organizations. Greg is Co-Founder and Chair of the Board of the award winning Schott Foundation for Public Education. Under Greg’s leadership, Schott began funding the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) in 1993 and later helped found the Alliance for Quality Education (AQE). Through litigation, legislation, media and grassroots organizing, both organizations’ efforts led to winning $7.4 billion annually for high-need New York schools. Schott won the Council of Foundation’s 2007 Critical Impact Award for this victory. In 1999, Schott provided the start-up funding and leadership for the Early Education for All (EEA) campaign in Massachusetts, which successfully advocated for a universal pre-kindergarten education bill. In 2004, the Foundation created The Schott Fellowship for Early Care and Education at Cambridge College to train new public policy leaders of color.

Greg also co-founded Access Strategies Fund, which helps disenfranchised communities harness their collective democratic power to improve their lives. Access has played a leading role in closing the racial gap in voter turnout in targeted communities and overturning racially unjust gerrymandered districts which has led to progressive leaders of color being elected. Greg serves on the Boards of the Institute for Student Achievement, a leading high school redesign organization, and the Alliance for Excellent Education, a highly effective national advocate for public high school policy. Greg is a founding executive board member of Congresswoman Barbara Lee’s One Voice PAC, which is successfully electing progressive federal candidates who have strong platforms on public education, racial and economic justice. He founded the CMP Media Foundation, served on the corporate board of CMP Media and currently serves on committees of six investment portfolios.

Greg has been dedicated to educational excellence throughout his career. Early in his career he worked as a high school English teacher, then he trained adult literacy teachers, and more recently he has worked to increase political access for disenfranchised populations. He has a Masters degree from Teacher’s College, Columbia University.

Sunita Leeds, Secretary and Treasurer

Sunita Leeds serves as Secretary/Treasurer for Education Voters of America and Education Voters Institute. With her husband, she also co-chairs The Enfranchisement Foundation, which focuses on breaking the cycles of poverty and intolerance in the United States, as well as on women’s issues. Sunita is on the Board of the Maret School and a member of the Executive committee of the National Jewish Democratic Council. She serves on the DNC Convention Rules Committee and is very active in Democratic Party work.

Sunita became heavily involved in Democratic Party work after moving to Washington, DC from Paris, France, in 1999. In France, she had served as President of the Parent Faculty Association at Marymount School and Treasurer of Kehilat Gesher-the Anglo-French Jewish Congregation which she helped found.

Prior to moving to France, Sunita headed a software development team at Bell Labs.

Sunita was born in India and immigrated to the US at the age of 7. Sunita and her husband Dan met at Cornell University and married in 1981. Her primary focus is raising their four children. Sunita earned a masters degree in computer science from the University of Southern California and a BA from Cornell University in Mathematics.

Rev. John Vaughn, Board Member

Reverend John Vaughn serves as the program director for The Twenty-First Century Foundation (21CF) based in Harlem, New York City, whose mission is to promote strategic Black philanthropy and to support social justice work within the Black community throughout the United States. He is responsible for overseeing the development, implementation and evaluation of the Foundation’s grantmaking and overall program work. Rev. Vaughn is an ordained minister in the American Baptist Church.

John previously served as Executive Director at the Peace Development Fund in Amherst, Massachusetts. From 1996 to 2000, John was Minister for Education and Social Justice at the Riverside Church in New York City. In the 1980s, John served as an Action Assistant at Riverside, where he facilitated the re-structuring of and coordinated the Christian Social Action Committee, and as the Assistant Minister for a Methodist congregation in San Francisco.

Rev. Vaughn has also served as the Director for Community Development at the Community Training and Assistance Center (CTAC) in Boston, Massachusetts, providing community-based organizations with training and technical assistance in community revitalization strategies and organizational development. Prior to that, John served as the Executive Director of East Harlem Interfaith in New York City, a coalition of over forty congregations and religious organizations worked together on vital neighborhood social issues.

Additionally, Rev. Vaughn serves on several boards, including East Harlem Block Schools, New Jersey Affordable Housing Network, Community Building Initiative, and the Donald Jacobs Internship Partnership, where he is the founding chairperson. He serves on the National Ecumenical Consultation planning committee, National Council of Churches. Rev. Vaughn received his undergraduate degree from Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts and his Master of Divinity from the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California.