After four years as executive director of Building Bright Futures, Julie Coffey announced that she will be leaving at the end of the year to spend more time with her family.
Calling her term as head of the nonprofit organization that has been deemed Vermont’s Early Childhood Advisory Council to Gov. Peter Shumlin both “intense and wonderful,” Coffey said she was leaving to “concentrate on my own family.”
“I leave with an optimism about BBF’s future as an important resource for young children and families in Vermont because of you,” she wrote to her colleagues.
Mary Burns, co-chair of BBF’s governing board, praised Coffey’s accomplishments. “Julie assembled the institutional infrastructure for BBF to become an inclusive and transparent organization ready to step up to the challenge of improving the wellbeing of young children and families by improving the system that serves them,” she said.
Coffey will stay in her position until Dec. 31.
“That gives us a window to search for a qualified replacement,” Burns said.
The BBF board of directors will be launching a search committee to find a new executive director.
In her resignation letter, Coffey wrote that her replacement will be able to provide a “fresh approach” and supply the “vigor” needed to ensure BBF is financially sustainable and that it will continue to grow and increase the good work it is doing with partner organizations.
“I am utterly convinced that direct services need a system upon which to thrive long term and a system, well-coordinated, becomes visible only when service delivery is well-oiled, a quality caliber, and accessible. Plain and simple,” she wrote.
BBF is responsible for setting up a system of planning, coordinating, integrating and developing evidence-based early childhood interventions, policies and resources that will improve the quality of services for families and children at the state and regional level.
