• Co-Director of the Early Childhood Leadership Institute

Reeva Sullivan Murphy has over 40 years of professional experience advocating for and implementing high quality services and sensible public policies for young children and families. She worked in private ECE programs and public education as a teacher and an administrator, and has provided consultation, mentoring and professional development locally, regionally, and nationally. She served in Rhode Island as the Child Care Administrator in the Department of Human Services for 8 years and then as Deputy Commissioner for Child Development in the Vermont Department for Children and Families from 2009 – 2019. In that role she oversaw a major revision of Vermont child care licensing regulations from 2012 – 2016. She served as the public Chairperson of Building Bright Futures, the state’s ECE Advisory Council from 2015-2018 and was instrumental in shaping Vermont’s Early Childhood Action Plan. She was a member of the Vermont’s Blue-Ribbon Commission on Access to High Quality Affordable Child Care in 2015. She currently serves on the Boards of VTAEYC and the Lamoille Family Center.

In 2019 she retired from government and founded Heart of a Child Early Care and Learning Consultation to advance positive change in the early childhood landscape, increase evidence informed innovation in policy and practice, and promote expansion of high-quality services in early care and learning. For five years, Heart of a Child provided feasibility studies, project management and business plan development for clients and communities seeking to expand the supply of sustainable high-quality early care and learning, providing skilled facilitation in planning, creative solutions based on best practice in the field, financing, facility design, and program development. 

In February 2024, Reeva accepted a position as Project Director and Senior ECE Subject Matter Expert for the Early Childhood Workforce Connector (ECWC) at WRMA, Inc, a Trimetrix company. ECWC, which is funded by the federal Department of Labor as an ECE Industry Intermediary, promotes developing, launching, and expanding Registered Apprenticeship (RA) programs to support and sustain a diverse, inclusive, well-qualified, and well-compensated early childhood education (ECE) workforce,

Ms. Murphy has a master’s degree in Early Childhood Education and Special Education from Rhode Island College. She has taken post graduate courses in social policy and management at The Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University. She is a 2012 graduate of the Vermont Leadership Institute at the Snelling Center for Government.