Cornelia Grumman is an American Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist. She is the Director of the Early Education Program at the Robert R. McCormick Foundation (http://mccormickfoundation.org/) in Chicago. From 2008–2012, she was the executive director of the First Five Years Fund (FFYF - http://ffyf.org/). The First Five Years Fund is an education initiative committed to improving the lives of at-risk children by leveraging cost-effective investments in early learning. A project of the Ounce of Prevention Fund (http://www.ounceofprevention.org/), FFYF is supported by five major family foundations: the Buffett Early Childhood Fund, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Irving Harris Foundation, the George Kaiser Family Foundation, and the Children's Initiative, a project of the J.B. and M.K. Pritzker Family Foundation. Education and early career Grumman enrolled at Duke University in 1981 with hopes to pursue a career in hotel and restaurant management; she even attended a cooking school in Paris, France beforehand to prepare. However, after meeting professional journalists at Duke through the DeWitt Wallace Center's Visiting Media Fellows program, she decided to reorient her ambitions, and pursue journalism. She graduated from Duke University in 1985 with a Bachelor of Science degree in public policy. After graduating, Grumman became a reporter for the Raleigh News & Observer. Her first major assignment was to take a Greyhound bus from one end of the state to the other and write about what she saw and whom she met. On this journey, she found herself impassioned by the types of stories that could not be found in press release, government reports or police blotters. "I was hooked," she wrote in an autobiographical sketch for "Meet the Tribune Editorial Board," a section published in the December 30, 2002, Chicago Tribune. "I wanted to see more of the world and to understand the connection between individuals, particularly those with faint voices, and the government institutions designed to serve them." In 1989, she worked in China as a stringer for The Washington Post, covering the student democracy movement that unfolded in Tienanmen Square. Grumman went on to earn her master's at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. [duke piece] "The Kennedy School enhanced my journalism by teaching me the broader context of issues," she said in an interview. By 1994, Grumman had returned to her home state of Illinois as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. She concentrated on issues about education, juvenile justice, Illinois politics and