Elizabeth Clay Roy is committed to advancing equity and opportunity in all places. Named as a 40 Under 40 Rising Star by New York Nonprofit Media and a community Trailblazer by Community Resource Exchange, she has more than 15 years of experience in participatory planning, coalition building, and collaborative policy making. She has led campaigns from the neighborhood to national level, and is now executive director of TakeRoot Justice in New York City.
Before joining TakeRoot, she was chief of staff at Phipps Neighborhoods and co-director of South Bronx Rising Together, an educational equity partnership. Prior to that, she was founding deputy director of Opportunity Nation, a national campaign to expand economic mobility, where she spearheaded creation of the Opportunity Index with research partner Measure of America, a first-of-its-kind measurement of contributing factors for economic opportunity at the state and local levels.
Elizabeth is an urbanist and the co-author of Shaping Vibrant Cities, a guidebook on effective community-led urban planning based on her participatory governance work with Janaagraha in Bangalore, India. She also served Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick as policy advisor and director of grassroots governance. Elizabeth and her family live in Harlem, where she has been on the boards of neighborhood organizations and a women's giving circle.
Elizabeth is a 2001 alumna of the SIT IHP program Cities in the 21st Century, which took her to India, South Africa, and Brazil, and spurred a lifelong connection to work in India. She received a BA from Columbia University; a master's degree in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and was an IGNITE Leadership Fellow at NYU's Wagner School for Public Service.