Kwesi Rollins is Project Director for Community-Based Systems Reform at IEL.  In this capacity, he works across each of IEL’s three programs of work: Developing and Supporting Leaders; Strengthening School-Family-Community Connections; and Connecting and Improving Policies and Systems that serve Children and Youth.  Currently, Rollins is supporting the Kellogg Foundation’s early childhood initiative, SPARK (Supporting Partnerships to Assure Ready Kids), providing assistance in leadership development, parent involvement, and community capacity building.  Before SPARK, Rollins supported the Kellogg Leadership for Community Change (KLCC) initiative, an effort designed to develop diverse community leadership that works across boundaries—geographic, racial, cultural, class, or faith—by mobilizing collective action to improve local conditions and the quality of life.  He served as one of the primary co-coordinators charged with designing and helping to implement a program to effect this social change—and producing the resulting framework, The Framework:  A Tool To Develop Collective Leadership for Community Change to enhance change efforts in other communities. 

Rollins has years of experience working with local communities and state agencies to improve multi-agency service delivery systems supporting children, youth, and families. He provided technical assistance and training to a range of state and county agencies, school districts, local schools and community-based organizations in demonstrations projects and/or technical assistance and training projects funded by the U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Justice Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP).

Rollins did a one-year internship at the Child Welfare League of America, as part of his studies toward an MSW focusing on cultural competence and kinship care.  He completed work on his MSW degree in 1996 at the University of Maryland at Baltimore School of Social Work, where he was a Maternal and Child Health Leadership Training Fellow.