Senior Director; Chicago, IL

Ellen joined Afton Partners in 2021 as a Senior Director and primarily leads the company’s Workforce Development practice. Motivated by the belief that every person who wants to work should have access to a career that offers stability, fulfillment, and dignity, Ellen brings over twenty years of experience advancing systems change across the fields of workforce development, human services, and higher education. She is a seasoned facilitator, capacity builder, and dot-connector committed to ensuring public systems work for those who need them the most.

At Afton, she provides advisory services to help workforce development ecosystems improve and align services, capacity building and technical assistance to strengthen the public workforce field, and support to both public and private sector employers in their adoption of inclusive and resilient workplace practices. Through robust community engagement processes, thoughtful data collection and analysis, and succinct storytelling, Ellen creates impact by ensuring that all voices, particularly those who will be most impacted or have been historically excluded, have an opportunity to be heard.

Some of the consulting projects Ellen has led include:

• Convened and co-facilitated the Illinois Governor’s Commission on Workforce Equity and Access using a multi-pronged human-centered design process to develop recommendations on how the state could improve the experience of job seekers within the public workforce system
• Facilitated a statewide Compensation and Benefits Task Force for the Colorado Department of Early Childhood to develop regional salary scales and recommendations for increasing access and use of key benefits including health care, retirement, and paid time off
• Supported the Montgomery County, Pennsylvania workforce board to better understand the hiring and retention needs of employers in their area and made recommendations for improving and aligning services to better meet those needs
• Co-designed and facilitated multiple employer cohorts to support their awareness and adoption of inclusive and fair chance hiring practices.
• Supported the re-design of a regional foundation’s signature early childhood leadership program to ensure it was more accessible and relevant for early care and education staff across the state

Before joining Afton, Ellen served twelve years as the Director of the Frontline Focus Training Institute at the Chicago Jobs Council. In this role—through curriculum development, best practice research, and coalition building—she established Frontline Focus as a premier, nationally recognized professional development training program for the workforce development field. 

Ellen is originally from Des Moines, Iowa and attended Drake University for her bachelor’s degree in English writing and sociology. She also received master’s degrees in both social work and public administration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She currently lives in Evanston, IL with her husband Adrian and two school-age children, Isa and Mateo. When not at work, you can find Ellen at Orange Theory Fitness, finishing the daily NYT crossword, or playing games with her family.