Joan Spoerl has been advocating for practices and policies to optimize young children’s well-being for over thirty years. She currently works for The Literacy Cooperative as Director of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. Before coming to Northeast Ohio from Chicago, she taught kindergarten for 10 years in a NAEYC-accredited hospital-based childcare center and then taught Head Start and preschool in the Chicago Public Schools. She was a finalist for the Kohl-McCormick Early Childhood Teaching Award and was chosen as the featured teacher in Voices for Illinois Children’s Start Early: Learning Begins at Birth prime-time television and radio advertising campaign. 

She previously served on the boards of NAEYC affiliates in Chicago and Cleveland and currently serves on the board of the Black Child Development Institute of Ohio and as a member of the Ohio Prenatal to Three Coalition Steering Committee. She is a member of the Rotary Club of Cleveland.

She earned her bachelor’s degree in Public Policy Studies from the University of Chicago and her Master’s Degree in Early Childhood Education from the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University.