Dayna L. Cunningham

MIT Community Innovators Lab (CoLab) Founder & Former Executive Director

Dayna Cunningham, (She/her) As Program Director of the ELIAS Project, an MIT-based collaboration between business, NGOs and government, she worked with leaders using profound innovation processes to create multi-sector initiatives for economic, social and environmental sustainability. Dayna worked as an Associate Director at the Rockefeller Foundation, and before that as a voting rights lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Dayna is a 2004 graduate of the Sloan Fellows MBA program at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She has an undergraduate degree from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges and a JD from New York University School of Law, a planning and development laboratory in the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) that designs and builds innovative large-scale multi-sector development collaborations combining sustainability, wellness, and democratic control of local economies in socially marginalized communities.

Now, Dayna serves as the Dean of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life.