As Senior Director, Afterschool Development Research and Policy, Bonny Gildin, Ph.D., is a member of the Senior Leadership Team and works with the All Stars Project’s (ASP) Chief Executive Officer and President to advance the organization’s afterschool and education policy initiatives. She is also a member of the ASP’s Board of Directors.

Following a decade of volunteering during the ASP’s founding years, Bonny joined the ASP staff in 1997. During her 25-year tenure, she served as a Vice President and played a leadership role across the organization. She has built broad private support and involvement networks for the ASP in New York City, Newark, Chicago and San Francisco, and raised more than $22 million and generated tens of thousands of hours in time and talent invested.

During the 1990s and early 2000s, Bonny worked with ASP’s co-founders to articulate and advance the core concepts of afterschool development practices and to bring these into education policy dialogues in New York City and nationally. Beginning in 2016 and in partnership with the Center on Research & Evaluation at Southern Methodist University, she spearheaded the ASP’s five-year project to identify and quantitatively evaluate our program outcomes. Bonny has also established numerous partnerships and thought leadership alliances, including with Stanford University (Dr. David Grusky), Montclair State University (Newark Montclair Urban Teaching Residency Program, Montclair State University Department of Family and Child Studies) and the Erikson Institute (Dr. Robert Halpern). In addition, she advises the organization on nonprofit and education partnerships and the ongoing development of grassroots afterschool development conferences, roundtables and working groups in Newark, Chicago and Dallas.

Her publications include “Afterschool: Growth! (The All Stars Way)” (Dec 2014, National Society for the Study of Education, Volume 113, Issue 2, pp. 425–444) and, with Cindy Onore, “A Community-University Partnership to Develop Urban Teachers as Public Professionals” (Jan 2013, Moving Teacher Education into Urban Schools and Communities: Prioritizing Community Strengths, Jana Noel [ed.]).

Prior to working at the ASP, Bonny taught linguistics at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University. She grew up in suburban Chicago, received a Bachelor of Arts in French from Grinnell College and earned a Master of Arts, Master of Philosophy and Ph.D. in Linguistics from Columbia University.