Our Advisory Board is made up of experts in the Early Learning and Care field. They provide guidance and recommendations on ways to achieve Early Edge’s mission.
Catherine Atkin serves as Edge’s Advisory Board Chair. She is the founder of the Early Learning Lab (now part of Start Early), and served as its Executive Director, and she was the former president of Early Edge California. Before launching the Early Learning Lab, Catherine was a Senior Advisor to the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. Catherine is an attorney with more than a decade of early childhood leadership and more than two decades of legal and policy experience at the federal, state, and local levels. Prior to her work in the early education field, she was a public interest attorney and served as Minority Counsel for a U.S. House of Representatives Banking and Financial Services subcommittee where she focused on urban development and housing. She graduated from Stanford University and holds a law degree from Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley and a Master’s Degree in Urban Planning from UCLA.
Allison Sidle Fuligni, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Child and Family Studies at Cal State LA. Before becoming a full-time faculty member, Dr. Fuligni was Associate Director of the Center for Improving Child Care Quality at UCLA, and a Research Associate at the National Center for Children and Families at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research has explored early parenting, child care quality, and other contextual factors affecting the development and school readiness of children from low-income ethnically-diverse families, particularly Dual Language Learners. She directed a longitudinal study of diverse school-readiness experiences of low-income children in Los Angeles which is one of the few studies of its kind to follow children in Head Start, community preschools, family child care programs, or no early education as they transitioned into kindergarten. As a professor, she is committed to improving developmental contexts for young children through higher education, and is the primary advisor of Cal State LA’s Master’s program in Child Development.
Carola Oliva-Olson is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Multilingual Promise, a professional learning and research organization transforming early childhood education by making multilingualism a standard of child development. With more than 30 years of leadership in the field, Dr. Oliva-Olson is nationally recognized for her expertise in multilingual teaching, educator preparation, and innovative approaches to professional learning. She leads groundbreaking initiatives that integrate AI-powered coaching and professional development tools to help educators strengthen language-rich practices and deepen family engagement. Her work includes creating degree pathways in Spanish, advancing professional learning models that elevate educators’ language expertise, and co-authoring research-based strategies such as Personalized Oral Language Learning (POLL). Before founding Multilingual Promise, Dr. Oliva-Olson served as Chief Innovation Officer at EDvance College, where she launched the nation’s first fully Spanish Bachelor of Arts degree in Early Childhood Studies. Today, she continues to advise state and national efforts to strengthen multilingual teaching and learning from birth through age five. Known for her visionary leadership at the intersection of research, technology, and practice, Dr. Oliva-Olson is dedicated to building systems that empower children, families, and educators to thrive.
The following advisors inform our strategies, build our network, raise our profile, and deepen our engagement in the Early Learning and Care field.
Katie Fallin Kenyon, Ph.D., has over two decades of experience in early childhood research, policy, and systems change. She is the founder and principal consultant of Kenyon Consulting, LLC, where she works with local early childhood systems—including First 5 commissions, county offices of education, and local planning councils—to strengthen programs and governance structures through strategic planning, research and evaluation, and policy development. Katie also serves as a member of the consulting team at Prenatal to Five Fiscal Strategies (P5FS), a nonprofit organization working to address inequitable fiscal and governance structures within the prenatal-to-five system. In this role, she contributes to fiscal mapping and cost modeling efforts as well as system design in states such as California and New Mexico, with a particular focus on data collection, survey design, data analysis, and report development. Prior to launching her consulting practice, Dr. Kenyon served as Director of Early Care and Education at First 5 LA, where she led research, evaluation, and early education initiatives focused on system improvement across Los Angeles County. She brings deep experience in using data and cross-sector collaboration to inform policy and investment strategies that advance equitable access to quality early learning.
Scott Moore has spent over two decades expanding access to preschool for California’s children and families. He is the Chief Executive Officer of Kidango, a leading preschool and childcare non-profit organization serving low-income families in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to Kidango, Scott was the Chief Policy Advisor for Early Edge California, where he designed and advocated for the policy that established the new Transitional Kindergarten grade and the California State Preschool Program. These programs have expanded pre-k access to over 500,000 children a year. Scott served as a Senior Fellow at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. Kidango’s work has been recognized by media outlets such as The New York Times, LA Times, NBC News, and EdSource.