Peggy Daly Pizzo

Peggy Daly Pizzo, M.Ed, Ed.M, is the President and Founder of Lift Each Other Up, LLC, a woman-owned company promoting and researching resilience in children, families, early educators and communities.

Peggy is also a former Associate Director, The Domestic Policy Staff, The White House, who advised the President on Head Start, child care, child welfare and other programs benefiting children and families. Peggy has worked in policy leadership positions at national organizations such as Zero to Three; and as a special assistant to the Commissioner of the Administration for Children, Youth and Families. She has been an instructor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and affiliate faculty at what is now known as the Zigler Center for Child Development and Social Policy at Yale University.

Currently Peggy is a Senior Policy Advisor on Early Childhood Education to state Senator Josh Becker and the Founder and Former Director of the Early Learning Project at the Stanford Graduate School of Education. In collaboration with Senator Becker and Janis Lambert Conallon of the Children’s Defense Fund California, she has helped win prioritization of the California child care workforce for the COVID-19 vaccine(s). She and Senator Becker also teamed up with Janis Lambert Conallon of the Children’s Fund California and Jose Vargas of United Ways California to develop a $54 million initiative, designed to reach every early educator in California, including every family child care educator, with outreach and navigation assistance to help them enroll in and use either California’s MediCal program or the program of Covered California subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. This initiative will also reach parents and children who participate in ECE programs.

At the request of Ms. Connallon and Mr. Vargas, Peggy also recently helped develop the ECE focus within the Healthy Start bill (AB1117), which is intended to fund community health workers who will help children, families and educators connect to mental health and health services.

In 2020, she co-authored two policy research briefs, The Ripple Effect and Deep Like the Rivers, supportive of significantly increased ECE funding. She also co-authored, with Susan Muenchow, Cecilia Zhang and Tim Harper, a policy research report on family child care networks in California: California’s Family Child Care Networks: Strengths, Challenges, and Opportunities (American Institutes for Research, December 2020).

She has authored two books, Parent to Parent (Beacon Press, 1982) on parent mutual support and advocacy organizations and Teaching and Leading with Emotional Intelligence, (Teachers College Press, 2017), a casebook integrating mental health and early care and education. She is currently at work on a monograph, California Dreaming: An Equity-Oriented Vision Statement and Financing Strategies for A Whole Baby/Whole Parent/Whole Educator Approach to Early Care and Education Prenatal to Age Five, with Kate Hoffman, M.Ed.

During the COVID19 pandemic, together with Caroline Wojcik, Elita Farahdel and Farihah Hossain of Lift Each Other Up, LLC, and others, she focused on researching and publishing policy briefs, infographics and presentations that demonstrate the economic, health and child and family support benefits of public investment in Early Head Start, Head Start, Child Care, PreK; trauma-informed approaches to young children; the importance of safe and healthy child care in keeping children out of foster care; and critical policy options needed to keep ECE safe and healthy during the pandemic.

Over the course of her career, she has authored 90 textbook chapters, journal articles, policy briefs, infographics, pamphlets and newsletter articles, in subject areas ranging from:
- the history of federal services to children;
- the elements of effective child advocacy, including advocacy by parents;
- family support;
- early intervention services for infants and toddlers;
- paid parental leave;
- parent outcomes and Head Start;
- infant toddler child care;
- Early Head Start; and
- partnership between the ECE and health sectors, at the practice and policy level.

She also co-authored, with Susan Aronson, M.D., a report for the U.S. government on health and safety in child care that formed the basis for the later development of Caring for Our Children.

She currently serves as Vice Chair of the Board of Directors for Kidango, the Bay Area’s largest provider of innovative early care and education services to low-income children and families. Kidango is also a lead child care advocacy organization, winning policy advances at the state level. She is also a member of the Board of Directors for All Five, a mixed income preschool based in East Palo Alto.

She has a Master’s degree in child development from Tufts University and a Master’s in Administration, Planning and Social Policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

She was one of the founders of The Children’s Inn at NIH, where she worked with Members of Congress, their spouses and the leadership of Merck, Inc to help bring to reality the dream of a family-centered residence for children being treated at the NIH for serious disease.