Julie Mooney

Julie Mooney previously served as a senior program director at MDC after rejoining the staff in 2015.  She led significant place-based initiatives focused on building the systems and structures that link young people to educational and economic opportunity. She oversaw MDC’s support of Great Expectations, a 10+ year initiative of the Kate B. Charitable Trust that aims to ensure that low-income young children in Forsyth County, N.C., are ready to succeed in school.  She also led the development and incubation of Made in Durham, a community partnership building an education-to-career system for youth in Durham, N.C., MDC’s hometown.   

In her previous work at MDC, Julie directed local, regional and national projects designed to advance strong education, workforce, and economic development initiatives in economically distressed communities throughout the South. She is coauthor of several MDC publications, including Building Communities By Design: A Guidebook for Community Change and Walking the Talk: Increasing Educational Options for Southern Youth. 

Prior to returning to MDC, Julie was the founding director of Blueprint NC, a partnership of state policy advocacy nonprofits focused on building the civic engagement and communications capacity of nonprofits and building their collective impact on state policy. She also served as the initial coordinator for Grantmakers for Southern Progress, a network of funders with the goal of increasing funding for social change in the South. She served for many years as a visiting lecturer in the Hart Leadership Program at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, and she worked previously as a community development planner and a community organizer. 

She holds a B.A. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Masters in City and Regional Planning (with a Community and Economic Development concentration) from the University of California at Berkeley.