Yasmina Vinci

Yasmina is the Executive Director the National Head Start Association. She came to the NHSA after several years as principal and founder of EDGE Consulting Partners. Yasmina founded EDGE after receiving her Master in Public Administration degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Yasmina’s experience is grounded in service as executive director of a child care program serving low-income families and as development director for a cluster of non-profit child care centers. In State government, she supervised Head Start research, administered the federal Dependent Care Grant and planned for New Jersey’s implementation of the very first Child Care and Development Block Grant. As the first Executive Director of NACCRRA (now ChildCare Aware of America), in collaboration with the American Academy of Pediatrics and academic partners, she built the first bridges between child health and child care professionals. In her current role, responding to the need of Head Start programs to measure their progress in Parent, Family and Community Engagement (PFCE), Yasmina raised funding to produce Parent Gauge, a measurement tool to inform programs’ continuous quality improvement as well as to produce analytics for further use. She currently serves on numerous advisory boards, is a contributing member of the World Forum on Early Care and Education, and is one of Results for America’s Moneyball for Government Nonprofit All Stars.