MIT World Speakers

Dayna Cunningham

A 2004 graduate of the Sloan Fellows MBA program, Dayna Cunningham holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and a juris doctor degree from the New York University School of Law. From 2006-2007 she directed the ELIAS Project, an MIT-based collaboration between business, NGOs and government that seeks to advance economic, social and environmental sustainability. Previously, she was an associate director at the Rockefeller Foundation, where she funded initiatives that examined the relationship between race and democracy, changing racial dynamics and new conceptions of race in the US, as well as innovation in civil rights legal work.

Cunningham has also worked as a voting rights lawyer in Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Mississippi and elsewhere in the South, and briefly as an officer for the New York City Program at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. The Ford Foundation recently announced a grant to the Center of $1.15M in support of three projects under the general heading of Deepening Local Democracy.