Vallay Varro
Vallay has over 20 years of working and consulting in education policy, government, politics and campaign work, strategic leadership and board development, non-profit start-up and growth, and strategic plan implementation. She enjoys helping organizations bring their vision to life by assessing, developing and supporting people, designing systems and processes to enhance organizational culture and simplify cross team workflows, and ensuring mechanisms are in place to monitor and measure impact.
Vallay is a former classroom teacher, an AmeriCorps state program coordinator, an early literacy coach and served as education policy director for St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman. In 2009, Vallay ran successfully to capture a citywide school board seat and was elected as school board director for Saint Paul Public Schools.
In 2011, Vallay began a decade long journey working in education policy and advocacy to ensure kids had access to high quality schools. During that time, she grew the network to over a dozen, created multiple fellowship programs, oversaw the transfer of programs and assets from two multi-million-dollar organizations into the national network, doubled and diversified the organization’s funding and invested in professionalizing their human resources and operating systems. Vallay spearheaded the creation of Expedition Advocacy, a bespoke online platform that allows local leaders to plan, monitor, and track their work.
After a decade of work in the education advocacy space Vallay launched mevvn, LLC to support nonprofit, small business and startup leaders in transforming the workplace for their employees and positively impacting the communities they serve. In addition to her management consulting practice, Vallay also launched a non-profit organization called The 21 Collective to ensure that marginalized communities have opportunities to be happy, healthy, and thriving.
Vallay was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and grew up in the Midwest. She received both her BA and M.ED from the University of Minnesota, serves as a mentor through KIPP Forward- NYC, serves on several national steering committees, is an alum of the Pahara-Aspen Fellowship program and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. She enjoys the outdoors, cooking and eating, traveling and exploring new destinations. Vallay and her husband live in Maryland with their three children.