Maria Flynn is JFF’s president and CEO, leading overall growth strategy, including funding diversification, strategic planning, and partnership building. As senior vice president, she guided JFF’s work to help low-income, low-skilled adults move on to family-supporting careers. She also led federal policy and advocacy strategies, focused on critical education and workforce issues. Maria is a national expert on career pathways, employer engagement, and place-based initiatives.
Previously, she was a member of the federal government’s Senior Executive Service and served as administrator of the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Policy Development and Research.
A national authority on workforce development, Maria speaks regularly at corporate and nonprofit events. These include the SOCAP18 conference in San Francisco, the Fortune CEO Initiative, McKinsey’s Consortium for Advancing Adult Learning and Development, the Poynter Institute and the Illinois State University Forum for Excellence. She was recognized by The Boston Globe as CEO of one of the top 100 Women-Led Businesses in Massachusetts for 2018.
Maria is an advisor to the MIT Inclusive Innovation Challenge. She also served for several years on the board of the National Association of Workforce Boards. She is regularly interviewed in the media about the future of work and has been quoted in articles from Bloomberg News, The Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, and Fast Company, among others.