Susan J. Oliver
Executive Vice President National & Community
Outreach, The Ready to Learn Partnership
Susan Oliver grew up milking cows and raising calves on her family's dairy farm in rural upstate New York. Her favorite childhood play space was the huge haymow where she and her siblings spent hours arranging hay bales into houses, forts, and small villages and populating them with imaginary children and families. Since then, she has spent much of her career working in the not-for-profit sector to improve living and learning conditions for very real kids and their families.
Today, as Executive Vice President--National and Community Outreach for the Ready to Learn Partnership (RTLP), she plans and implements parent education strategies that use multi-platform children's entertainment properties as a base for helping low income parents strengthen their preschoolers' emergent literacy skills.
Prior to her involvement with the RTLP, Ms. Oliver served as Executive Director of the national non-profit organization Playing for Keeps, which promotes the important role of play in children's healthy development. Before that, she managed marketing, business development, and philanthropic development at the National Lekotek Center, which makes play accessible to children with disabilities, and at Family Support America, a national non-profit committed to building community-based support and resources for children and families.
Other past professional positions have included General Manager of a niche direct marketing agency serving the heavy equipment industry, adjunct Professor of Marketing at DePaul University, various annual giving positions at Boston University, and admissions officer at Harvard College.
Ms. Oliver is a frequent speaker and contributor of articles to journals in the early childhood arena and the toy and children's entertainment industries. She contributed the forward to Children's Play: The Roots of Reading, edited by Edward Zigler, Dorothy Singer, and Sandra Bishop-Josef of Yale University, which was honored by the American Library Association's Choice magazine as an outstanding academic title in 2005.
Ms. Oliver is a past president of Women in Direct Marketing International (Chicago Chapter) and the Radcliffe Club of Chicago. She holds the B.A. degree from Harvard University and the M.B.A. degree from Boston University.
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