Jonah Edelman

Jonah Edelman is Co-Founder and Executive Officer of Stand for Children. Stand for Children’s nine state affiliates (AZ, CO, IL, IN, LA, OR, TN, TX, and WA) help children at the bottom of the economic ladder to rise up, through effective dropout prevention strategies, expanded career technical education, and improved college preparation and post-secondary guidance, increasing access to quality early childhood education, improving literacy instruction and interventions, increasing funding equity and adequacy, and improving school quality in communities with a concentration of chronically low performing schools.

Stand for Children achieves scaled impact in these areas through a variety of strategies, including: championing evidence-based policies and targeted investments; ensuring the policies and investments we champion actually reach the classroom and help children, and are sustained over time; empowering families to effectively support and advocate for their children’s education; and electing candidates to school boards, state legislature, and other key offices who will champion or support our priority solutions.

Beyond the advocacy efforts described above, in response to the rising tide of intolerance in schools, Stand for Children created Teach Kindness to help make kindness commonplace and meanness rare in middle schools across the nation and encourage more empathetic education responses to unproductive student behavior in order to reduce unnecessary suspensions.