Natalie Walrond serves as Senior Managing Director, Whole Person, Family, and Community Systems for the Early Learning, Health and Human Development division at WestEd. In this role, she partners with two other senior managing directors to oversee quality, impact, talent development, and business development for the division. Walrond brings to her work thirty years of experience in K-12 education, finance, and strategy, working with both for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Walrond speaks and writes on social and emotional well-being, system alignment and coherence, academic excellence, and equity.
Walrond also serves as the Associate Director of the Region 15 Comprehensive Center at WestEd, overseeing the focus area leads, the equity lead, and the center’s visibility and eminence building efforts. Walrond served as Director of the national Center to Improve Social and Emotional Learning and School Safety, housed at WestEd, from 2019 – 2023. In this role she led the vision, strategic direction, and external engagement of the center. Walrond led a team of values-driven experts who worked nationally to build state and local capacity to integrate evidence-based approaches to social and emotional development and school safety with academic teaching and learning, school climate and culture, and all of the ways that children and youth experience school.