Lissette Moreno-Kuri

Lissette came to Enlace in 2021 with over 25 years of experience in the field. She spent 20 years at Logan Square Neighborhood Association, first as a Community Schools Resource Coordinator and later as the Program Director of their community schools initiative, which included five public schools. In addition to supporting Resource Coordinators with program and partnership development, participant recruitment and retention, evaluation and data collection, and budget management, she worked hard to ensure that programming was responsive to the needs of English-language learners and spearheaded a partnership with the City College of Chicago to provide adult education and family literacy programming. She also supported the efforts of Grow Your Own Illinois, which focuses on supporting people of color in becoming public school teachers, where she later became a Program Director. In all of her roles, including as a bilingual teacher, she has advocated for educational equity for immigrant communities and communities of color. Lissette received a BA from Northeastern Illinois University and an MA in Educational Leadership in Higher Education, also from Northeastern. She is a graduate of the Illinois Latino Nonprofit Leadership Academy and received an award for Prestigious Leadership for a Changing World from the Ford Foundation in 2005. In 2014, she co-authored an article with Tammy Oberg De La Garza entitled Building Strong Community Partnerships: Equal Voice and Mutual Benefits, which was published in the Journal of Latinos and Education. She was born in Chicago to Mexican parents, moved with her family to Guadalajara, Jalisco at the age of 12, and moved back to Chicago. She is a wife and mother of three children.