After 14 proud years as Executive Director of City Year Detroit, I have transitioned to proactive retirement and full time volunteer/education advocacy work throughout Detroit as of May 25, 2015.
At City Year, I was responsible for Michigan’s largest AmeriCorps program. During that period, over 900 young adult City Year “corps members” served full-time for up to two years each, providing data-driven all day academic classroom tutoring, mentoring and role modeling to thousands of Detroit’s school children, keeping them “in school and on track to graduation.” CYD also partners, nationally and in Detroit, with Johns Hopkins University and Communities in Schools, Inc. for our award-winning U. S. Department of Education-funded Invest in Innovation (i3) school transformation model called "Diplomas Now."
From 1983-2000, I served for over 17 years as Executive Director/CEO of the Michigan Metro Girl Scout Council in Detroit, increasing the girl membership from 21,000 to 43,000 and the registered adult volunteer membership from 6,000 - 14,000, the 4th largest Girl Scout council in the country, proudly earning the 1992 CRAIN’s “Best Managed Non Profit Award.”
I was elected to the Detroit Board of Education (1990-94) and was named one of CRAIN’s Detroit Business honorees as “Detroit’s 100 Most Influential Women.” Currently, I champion the transformation of public school education throughout Detroit with the Coalition for the Future of Detroit Schoolchildren.
I've served on and led numerous non-profit and civic boards in Detroit for over 30 years, focused primarily on education and Detroit’s revitalization. Currently, I serve on the boards of New Detroit, Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, City Connect Detroit, and the YWCA of Metro Detroit; I was a founding board member of ARISE Detroitland Co-Chair the Education Committee of the Osborn/Clark Park Promise Neighborhood and served on the 2015 Governance Committee of the Coalition for the Future of Detroit Schoolchildren. In 2014, Mayor Mike Duggan appointed me to the newly established board of the Detroit Housing Commission and in 2015 to the Inaugural Board of the Detroit Promise Zone Authority.
I was a Co-Founder of the DPS K-8 Golightly Education Center — later named a National Blue Ribbon School by President Clinton — and in 2012 was named Chair of the Self Governing School Council for Detroit Collegiate Preparatory High School @ Northwestern, a DPS/Diplomas Now High School.
I earned an Executive MBA/Advanced Management at the Eli Broad School of Management in 1989 from MSU (Troy Graduate School of Business Campus) and a BFA in Music/Piano Performance in 1962 from the University of Georgia near my hometown of Atlanta. In July 2011, I was awarded a Harvard Business School scholarship by the HBS Detroit Alumni Club for an executive education week at HBS called Strategic Perspectives in Nonprofit Management (SPNM).
I've lived in downtown Detroit since 1975 in Mies Van der Rohe’s Lafayette Park. For 29 years, I was married to the late Kermit G. Bailer, and I am the proud mother of two children, Kelly Bailer Krauss of Lebanon, New Jersey and Ryan Kermit Bailer of Brooklyn, New York. In 2008, I married John Van Camp, also of Detroit, and we continue to live in downtown Detroit in Lafayette Park.