Senior Director; Denver, CO

Provides leadership to Afton’s early care and education practice with 15 years of experience in early education and a particular focus on program, system, and policy design.  

Megan is a Senior Director at Afton Partners, joining the firm in 2022. Megan has focused her career on advancing education equity and has held a variety of positions in early childhood education including in non-profits, government, and higher education. She began her career as a Head Start teacher which informs her practical approach to policy and system design. Megan has led a variety of projects and programs throughout her career, many of which focused on improving quality and working conditions in early childhood programs. Megan brings strategic thinking, engaged facilitation, thorough research and writing skills, and team leadership to Afton’s early childhood practice. 

Megan’s work at Afton has contributed to groundbreaking advancements in the early childhood field. She is particularly passionate about improving compensation for early childhood educators, developing more cohesive ECE governance and funding systems, and collaborating with those most impacted by the challenges to design solutions. While at Afton, Megan has: 

• Led the development of early childhood workforce grants in collaboration with partners at the state agency and across the field, to raise wages across the field. Designing this first-in-the nation approach to improving ECE compensation involved extensive community engagement, cost modeling to structure grants, and determining accountability, communication, and implementation priorities. 
• Managing the redesign of a state’s early childhood funding systems as part of the transition to a new government agency focused on early care and education. Megan works with leaders across state agencies and with a dedicated team at Afton to reimagine an ECE funding system that is better, fairer, and simpler for early childhood providers and families. 
• Directed projects across Afton’s early care and education portfolio that support better access to high quality including in Illinois, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Colorado.
• Provided leadership within the early care and education practice and worked with fellow Senior Directors to seek new opportunities to grow impact.

Before coming to Afton, Megan was the Chief Program Officer at Denver’s Early Childhood Council where she developed programs to strengthen local early childhood systems and support child care providers. Additionally, Megan studied and worked at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education as a Zaentz Fellow where she developed curriculum and learning experiences for education leaders. Megan also supported early childhood program leaders with capacity-building as a consultant at Booz Allen Hamilton and organized collaboration between early childhood funders as coordinator at Illinois Action for Children. She earned a bachelor’s degree in religion from Colorado College, a master’s in early childhood education curriculum and instruction from Arizona State University, and a master’s degree in human development and psychology from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In her free time, Megan enjoys teaching storytelling workshops, playing pickleball, and spending time with her dog, Abby.