Lucy Recio serves as the Senior Advisor for Narrative and Movement Building at NAEYC. In this role, Lucy advances NAEYC's vision for an equitable, diverse, well-prepared, and well-compensated early childhood education profession by providing strategic and operational leadership that integrates the voices, stories, and experiences of early childhood education professionals in NAEYC’s programs, services, and impact. Her work is anchored by her roots as a community organizer and rests on more than fifteen years of building dynamic and effective issue advocacy campaigns, programs, and systems to inform policy and legislation, shape public understanding and perception, and create processes for meaningful constituent engagement and advocate mobilization.

Lucy first joined NAEYC in 2016 and has served as both NAEYC’s Senior Public Policy Analyst and Director of Advocacy. She has led grassroots mobilization, digital engagement, and national story collection campaigns to increase public investments towards child care and early learning, quadrupled NAEYC’s advocate capacity and engagement, driven equity and power building conversations within the early childhood education space, and helped secure more than $54 billion in COVID-19 relief dollars for the child care sector. 

Lucy also serves as an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy and at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, where she relies on her current work and previous positions with the Office of the Bronx Borough President in New York City, the Bronx LGBTQ Center, the National Black Child Development Institute, and as a high school Spanish teacher, to support, mentor and coach the next generation of policy leaders. 

A native of the Dominican Republic, Lucy takes pride in the many ways her bicultural, binational reality inform her professional orientation alongside her bachelor's degree in international culture and politics from Georgetown University and master's in public administration from CUNY—Baruch College, a distinction she received as a National Urban Fellow.