Brean Witmer (she/her/hers)

Director of Research and Evaluation

Brean Witmer is the Director of Research and Evaluation at the Great Schools Partnership (GSP). She brings over a decade of experience in community- and school-based programming, research, policy analysis, and program evaluation to GSP, and has worked with nonprofit organizations and research institutions in Boston, New York City, Chicago, and Philadelphia. Most recently, Brean served as the Senior Program Manager of Monitoring and Evaluation at Action for Healthy Kids. While there, she was responsible for providing expertise, vision, and leadership for the strategic direction and implementation of program evaluation surrounding key elements of the organization’s program model with schools and districts nationwide. She also served as the lead facilitator of the National School District Wellness Coalition, a collective impact group made up of nearly 40 of the country’s largest urban school districts. Brean believes in the power of using data to enhance equitable policies and practices, to improve student outcomes, to create safe and supportive learning environments, to engage community members and families, and to tell meaningful stories of change. Brean received her Bachelor of Arts in sociology from Bucknell University; she earned a joint Master of Arts from Tufts University in child development and in urban and environmental policy and planning, where she focused her research on school-based health programming in communities facing concentrated inequities. In her free time, Brean can be found chasing after her two young kids, Evie and Sam, alongside her husband, Joe.