programs (Districts, Family Child Care Networks, Family, Friends and Neighbors Network, Head Start and Early Head Start, and State Preschool) to create developmentally appropriate and culturally responsive classrooms, catalyze a culture that prioritizes family voices, and equip educators with resources and training to empower a competitive edge and give children the specialized care they deserve.

In 2015, she applied for and was awarded California’s largest State Preschool grant for Lynwood Unified School District. This yearly, five million dollar allocation funded the district’s successful expansion to universal preschool, which at the time was an anomaly to the state of California. By making early learning a fundamental right for Lynwood Unified, she established a continuum of learning that yielded a 93% high school graduation rate, and 95% of early education staff completing their bachelor's. Due to its undeniable success, The University of California, Los Angeles’ Center for the Transformation of Schools conducted a year-long case study spotlighting the ECE program, led by Dr. Harris, who operationalized equity through local funding to transform outcomes for children and families in impoverished communities.

Harris is passionate about building a comprehensive developmental pipeline, and believes the path to an equitable, just world is by empowering family partnerships, prioritizing a comprehensive birth to eight systems, and raising the bar for early educators to have access to professional development pathways and are compensated for their crucial work.

She is a recognized voice in the early learning field for her expertise and advocacy to make childcare a civil right, sever multi-generational cycles of poverty through quality early childhood education, and transform the early learning profession into a viable economic opportunity. Recent organizations and keynote topics include the National Head Start Association Parent and Family Engagement Conference; California Association of African American Superintendents and Administrators Conference, Equity through Early Learning; National Association for the Education of Young Children Conference, Prevention Vs. Intervention; Yale-Scholastic Collaborative Resilience Symposium, Building Resilience through Literacy in Early Childhood, Covid and the Youngest Learners; Florida Association of School Superintendents; A Focus on Prek Education; and Every Child California Conference.

During the pandemic, she remained a steadfast advocate for families, children, and early learning providers. She led monthly supply drive-thrus which included food, PPE, books, and at-home learning supplies; led communication initiatives so that families and educators were abreast on evolving health updates and the communitybased services available to them; and she also helped innovate the way families and providers connected with one another across the screen, including a “Zoom” Concert for children featuring Grammy Award winner Coy Bowles and a live reading of Rainbow Fish in partnership with Nick Jr. She was featured on Spectrum News 1 to provide insight on Biden’s American Families Plan and contributed to parent-centric articles such as Mom.com to empower and ease parental anxieties during the worldwide Pandemic. She continued to innovate professional development for early learning educators by developing content for an online learning platform, with topics that were hypersensitive to the strains of the pandemic, and also led her coaching teams through a pivot to virtual coaching. She also coordinated the distribution of monthly surveys to over 900 providers in Los Angeles to report ongoing needs assessment data to the governor’s office.

She has served on various boards and held leadership roles throughout her career, including: The Foundation for Early Education, California Child Development Association of Administrators Conference Board, QSLA Coaching Chair, QSLA Leadership Council member, Scholastic Equity and Early Childhood Board, the Catalyst Corporation Board, and is a Community Action Member of the African American Infant and Maternal Mortality initiative.