Alicia Wilson-Ahlstrom

Alicia Wilson-Ahlstrom is vice president for learning and innovation at Children’s Funding Project. She brings more than twenty years’ experience in working with community partnerships, philanthropic partners, and policy bodies that provide essential support to children, youth, families and communities and a decade’s experience supporting local, state, Tribal, and national decision-makers in building and expanding accessible data on federal, state, and local public funding for children and youth. She is the author of Children’s Funding Project’s seminal paper Funding Brighter Futures: How Local Governments Are Enhancing Investments in Kids.

Alicia has provided fiscal mapping technical assistance to communities receiving Promise Zone, Promise Neighborhood, and Performance Partnership Pilot federal grants. She has also supported policy and learning initiatives of the Federal Interagency Working Group on Youth Programs, Urban Institute, Jobs for the Future, and National Science Foundation and has held more than a dozen board, reviewer, and committee appointments.

She has served as the principal investigator for the Use of Research Evidence Learning Cohort Design project and as primary consultant to the Democratizing Evidence curation project in partnership with the William T. Grant Foundation to advance evidence-based practice and policymaking in the child- and youth-serving fields. Alicia is co-author of the chapter “Just Quality: How Youth Justice Programs Can Inform Program Quality Efforts to Support Equitable Learning and Development Systems” in the published volume It Takes an Ecosystem: Understanding the People, Places, and Possibilities of Learning and Development Across Settings. Recently, she was appointed to a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine committee on Education for Thriving in a Changing Climate, serving as a national expert on out-of-school time for this national consensus study.

Alicia holds a Master of Public Policy and a Master of Social Work from the University of Michigan and an Executive MBA from the Quantic School of Business and Technology. She has also held several fellowships including the Coro Fellowship for Public Affairs and the Moody Professional Exchange Fellowship in Cape Town, South Africa. Born and raised on the south side of Chicago, Alicia is a proud Midwesterner and enjoys spending time with her husband and three children.