Director
Cornelia Grumman has worked as a non-profit and philanthropic leader specializing in strengthening city, state and federal education and early care and learning systems. As the former Education Director of the Robert R. McCormick Foundation, Grumman spearheaded multiple efforts to increase kindergarten readiness among Illinois’ nearly 900,000 young children under age 6. At UChicago’s Urban Education Institute, she helped bring national attention to research and tools that catalyzed increases in high school graduation and college enrollment rates among Chicago Public Schools students. As Executive Director of the First Five Years Fund, managing teams based in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Seattle, she contributed to efforts to leverage nearly $1 billion more for child care and Head Start programs, and spearheaded creation of a new $500 million competitive fund for states to strengthen early learning systems.
At the start of her career, Grumman spent 23 years as a newspaper journalist, covering social justice, criminal justice, state, metropolitan and education issues. She held reporting positions at the Chicago Tribune, the Daily Southtown, and the News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C. From 2000 to 2008, as a member of the Tribune's editorial board, Grumman’s series of editorials on Illinois' death penalty helped spur sweeping legislative reforms, including electronic taping of police interrogations in homicide cases. That series won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Her 2005 series on conditions in the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center led to federal and state investigations, scrutiny by independent monitors, a federal court-mandated plan for reform and the removal of five top administrators at the center.
Currently Grumman currently is reporting and writing a book.
Grumman earned a master’s from the Harvard Kennedy School and a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Duke University. She and her husband, journalist Jim Warren, reside in Chicago. Both their sons have been Uniting Voices Chicago participants, and her youngest, Eliot, performs currently with Voice of Chicago.