Malai Amfahr

Malai has over 20 years of experience working in advocacy and community engagement in the nonprofit sector, primarily focused on youth. She is currently the Senior Program Officer for Constituency Outreach and Engagement with the national Campaign for Grade-Level Reading (CGLR). In her role, she supports macro-level systems change within the education sector across CGLR’s 380+ coalition communities across the nation. This work involves supporting community backbone agencies with deeper engagement and learning opportunities around CGLR’s shared agenda to ensure more hopeful futures for children with literacy as the primary driver. Prior to her role with CGLR, Malai was with United Way of Story County (UWSC) where she provided oversight of UWSC’s work in education. She has served on several committees including holding the office of co-chair of Iowa’s Equity Advisory Committee with Early Childhood Iowa. Currently, she is a fellow with MidIowa Health Foundation’s Health Connect Fellowship and serves on two non-profit board of directors focused on youth. Malai has facilitated workshops and conducted presentations at national, state, and local conferences. Her subject matter expertise is in systems change, community engagement, the collective impact framework, program design and analysis, community and coalition building, youth engagement and volunteer management.