Lucy Recio serves as the Senior Advisor for Narrative and Movement Building at NAEYC. In this role, Lucy provides strategic and operational leadership that integrates the voices, stories, and experiences of early childhood education professionals to inform, guide, and grow NAEYC’s programs, services, and impact and advance NAEYC’s vision for an equitable, diverse, well-prepared, and well-compensated early childhood education profession. Her work is anchored by her roots as a community organizer and rests on more than a decade 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. 

Prior to joining NAEYC, Lucy held leadership roles at the Office of the Bronx Borough President in New York City, the Bronx LGBTQ Center, the National Black Child Development Institute, and entered education as a high school Spanish teacher in her hometown of the Bronx. 

A native of the Dominican Republic, Lucy takes pride in the many ways her bicultural, binational reality inform her professional orientation and her unwavering commitment to nurture radical joy, inspiration she draws from Emma Goldman’s famous quote, “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.”

Lucy holds a bachelor's degree in international culture and politics, with a concentration in justice and peace studies from Georgetown University and a master's in public administration from CUNY—Baruch College, a distinction she received as a National Urban Fellow.