Executive Director (2018-Present)
Elizabeth Clay Roy is an entrepreneurial and collaborative leader of social change initiatives, and the Executive Director of TakeRoot Justice. Named as a 40 Under 40 Rising Star by New York Nonprofit Media and a Trailblazer by Community Resource Exchange, she has years of experience in organizational development, participatory planning, coalition building and collaborative policy making.
Before joining TakeRoot, she was the Chief of Staff at Phipps Neighborhoods and Co-Director of South Bronx Rising Together, a education equity partnership. Prior to that, she was the founding Deputy Director of Opportunity Nation, a national campaign to expand economic mobility where she created 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 level.
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 a Policy Advisor and the Director of Grassroots Governance. Elizabeth and her family live in Harlem. She received a B.A. from Columbia University and a Masters in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was an IGNITE Leadership Fellow at NYU’s Wagner School for Public Service.