Alicia Wilson-Ahlstrom brings twenty years of experience to working with community partnerships, philanthropic partners, and policy bodies that provide essential supports to children, youth, families and communities on strategic policy and programmatic development in both the US and abroad. Alicia has served as the principal investigator for the Use of Research Evidence Learning Cohort Design project and primary consultant to the Democratizing Evidence curation project in partnership with the William T. Grant Foundation to advance evidence-based practice and policymaking and research-practice partnerships in the child- and youth-serving fields and served as a consultant with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Forward Promise initiative to strengthen community supports for boys and young men of color.
Alicia has also provided fiscal mapping technical assistance to a cohort of communities receiving Promise Zone, Promise Neighborhood, or Performance Partnership Pilot federal grants, staffed the finance committee for the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative, and consulted with a diverse range of communities including Los Angeles; Detroit; Baltimore; Hennepin County, Minnesota; New Orleans; Pierce County, Washington and Berea, Kentucky on fiscal and resource mapping initiatives. Alicia brings wide-ranging expertise in youth development practice and policy, working at the local, state and national levels and is the author of numerous publications including Funding Brighter Futures: How Local Governments are Enhancing Investments in Kids, From Soft Skills to Hard Data: Measuring Youth Program Outcomes, and Research Practice Partnerships, an online curation project developed in partnership with the William T. Grant Foundation. A former Coro Fellow, Alicia holds master’s degrees in Social Work and Public Policy from the University of Michigan.
