Who We Are

Alison Badgett, EdD
Founder and Principal Consultant

Prior to founding From Charity to Change, Alison was executive director of the Petey Greene Program, which recruits 1,000 volunteer tutors from 30 universities to support the academic goals of currently and formerly incarcerated people in 50 jails, prisons, and reentry programs. Alison’s strategic plan to reposition the organization for sustainability, scale and systemic impact is detailed in “Systems Change: Making the Aspirational Actionable,” published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and “Integrating Service Learning with Systemic Change,” a chapter she authored in Cases on Academic Program Redesign for Greater Racial and Social Justice. 

Previously, Alison was executive director of Raise Your Hand Texas, an organization developing breakthrough ideas to improve education, piloting them in schools and supporting the public policies that allow them to scale. With her leadership, the organization launched a five-year, $10 million initiative to showcase and scale blended learning, and a 10-year, $50 million initiative to improve teacher preparation and the status of teaching.

Before joining Raise Your Hand Texas, she was executive director of several organizations related to housing and homelessness:

  • The New York State Association for Affordable Housing, a 400-member trade association engaged in policy advocacy at the local, state, and federal level, for which she was recognized as a 40 under 40 political executive by City and State New York,
  • The Homes for New Jersey campaign, a broad coalition of civic and business leaders, whom she led in the development and advocacy of a policy agenda for 100,000 affordable homes, and,
  • The Mercer Alliance to End Homelessness, a diverse coalition of leaders from the nonprofit, business, and government sectors, for whom she developed a three-year, $3.6 million demonstration program to permanently house the chronically homeless.

In addition to leading nonprofits, she served as senior policy advisor to a governor of New Jersey. Alison has a bachelor’s in politics from Princeton University, a master’s in philosophy and education from Columbia University Teachers College, and a global doctorate in education from the University of Southern California, where she wrote her dissertation on educating social change agents.