Senior Associate, Valhalla Foundation
Elena works on Valhalla’s early childhood team. As a Senior Associate, she supports investment sourcing, develops grant recommendations, and contributes to portfolio monitoring and performance review. She also conducts field research and analysis to track trends in the early childhood landscape and surface insights that inform the team’s strategy and decision-making.
Before joining Valhalla, Elena was a student at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, where her studies centered on the early childhood workforce and the development of California’s TK-3 Early Childhood Education Specialist Credential. Elena has also served as a Teach For America corps member, teaching kindergarten at Education for Change, a charter school network in Oakland, California, and at KIPP Public Schools Northern California.
Elena holds a Master of Arts from the Stanford Graduate School of Education and a Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy from Duke University.