Emily Mancini-Fitch

Portland Housing Authority’s Resident Services Manager, Emily Mancini-Fitch, has managed youth and educational programs in public housing for 12 years. Formerly a two-term AmeriCorps State and National member at the Portland Housing Authority Sagamore Village Education Center, Emily has worked to build and strengthen programming focused on youth development, leadership development, education access, service learning, and community building. Emily has developed cross-sector partnerships to increase accessibility to educational programming for low-income students of all ages. Under her leadership, the scope, scale, and quality of educational programming has expanded with teams of educators, mentors, and youth leaders serving family housing communities around the city. Additionally, the PHA Scholarship program expanded to include non-traditional students, trade schools, received outside investments, and has disbursed $148,000 to 81 recipients in the last decade. Emily works with the local schools to increase opportunities for extended and summer learning as well as food access during summer break. They also work together to troubleshoot barriers to parent engagement and equitable access to resources for low-income families. In Summer of 2022 they offered paid internships to teens, provided one-on-one tutoring to elementary youth, and fed hundreds of children in public housing communities. Through the partnership with one elementary school, they were able to ensure 100% attendance for Parent Teacher Conferences in Spring of 2022.