September 17, 2012
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Cambridge, MA—After a national search of 115 candidates, the Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) today announced that Marny Sumrall has joined the organization as Executive Director of CEP’s YouthTruth® program. YouthTruth is a national program that provides data and insight to help school leaders and their partners increase their effectiveness and impact. Through student surveys, YouthTruth brings the critical voice of the students to the decisions that shape education and serve our youth.
“Marny is a wonderful addition to the YouthTruth team,” said Phil Buchanan, president of CEP. “Her passion, expertise, and knowledge of K-12 education are exactly what we were looking for. Marny joins us at an exciting time. Earlier this year, we embarked on a comprehensive planning effort for YouthTruth, looking for ways to grow the program. Based on the bridge funding we’ve received and the strength of our sustainability plan, I firmly believe YouthTruth has the potential to transform education nationwide. Marny is the highly motivated, strategic, and entrepreneurial leader who can drive that transformation. She will be a powerful and passionate ambassador for the cause of listening to those who should matter the most—students.”
Marny brings 18 years of experience in education leadership to the position, most prominently serving as the Vice President of Strategic Initiatives with SCORE! Educational Centers division of Kaplan. Before joining YouthTruth, Marny led business development efforts for Grockit, a leading adaptive and social learning platform.
“I am energized by CEP’s vision for YouthTruth,” said Marny. “Listening to the student voice ought to be the rule in every school—not the exception. I have consistently witnessed the power that is unleashed when quantitative data and qualitative feedback are combined to inform decisions. Data can tell such a compelling story, especially when the nuances are highlighted by individual comments.”
As the Executive Director, Marny will be responsible for marketing YouthTruth and representing the project publicly, overseeing district and state recruitment efforts nationally, leading efforts to innovate the way YouthTruth operates, and guiding the overall implementation of the project.
Reporting directly to the President of CEP, she will be based in San Francisco, where she will lead a team of 7. Additionally, Marny will join the senior leadership team at CEP, which is headquartered in Cambridge, MA.
About YouthTruth
YouthTruth is a national survey program that provides rigorous, comparative, and actionable data to schools, districts and networks, and education funders. The goal of YouthTruth is to gather comprehensive feedback from students—the ultimate beneficiaries of school improvement efforts—and create insights that will enable school leaders and their partners to increase their effectiveness and impact. YouthTruth builds on CEP’s ten years of experience gathering comparative feedback on behalf of philanthropic funders. YouthTruth began gathering perspectives from high school students in 2008. As of the end of the 2011-2012 school year, the program has surveyed approximately 100,000 students from 215 schools nationwide. For more information, visit www.youthtruthsurvey.org.
About the Center for Effective Philanthropy
The Center for Effective Philanthropy (CEP) is a nonprofit organization with a mission to provide data and create insight so philanthropic funders can better define, assess, and improve their effectiveness and impact. CEP received initial funding in 2001 and has offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts and San Francisco, California. For more information on CEP’s work, including its research, publications, and assessment tools, see www.cep.org.
