Liz Simons

Liz Simons is chair of the board of the Heising-Simons Foundation. A former teacher, Liz worked in Spanish-bilingual and English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms, and subsequently founded Stretch to Kindergarten, a spring-summer early childhood education program. She currently serves as the vice chair of the Marshall Project, and is on several other boards including the Learning Policy Institute, the Foundation for a Just Society, and Math for America. She is also on the Leadership Council of Too Small to Fail (a joint initiative of the Opportunity Institute and the Clinton Foundation), the advisory council for Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and she has recently joined the Stanford PACS Advisory Board. She volunteers at The Beat Within (a magazine by and for incarcerated youth) in Santa Clara Juvenile Hall, in a journalism class at Eastside College Preparatory School, and as a storyteller in a transitional kindergarten class at Belle Haven School. Liz earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, and a master’s in education from Stanford University. Liz is a member of the Philanthropy Workshop and she and her husband, Mark Heising, are members of the Giving Pledge.