Senior Director, Policy and Advocacy, UnidosUS
Laura MacCleery is Senior Director, Policy and Advocacy, for UnidosUS, the nation’s largest Latino civil rights organization, where she leads work on democracy and voting rights, economic justice, and food and nutrition. Previously, she was the Director of Strategy and Program for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, where she directed projects on nutrition and public health, food safety and dietary supplements.
She has served in a wide range of senior executive positions, including as Vice President for Consumer Policy and Mobilization at Consumer Reports, Director of Government Relations at the Center for Reproductive Rights, Deputy Director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, and Congress Watch Director at Public Citizen.
For 23 years, she has focused her efforts on policy shifts that make a difference in people’s lives at scale. Major current areas of work include democracy, electoral integrity and combatting disinformation; an equitable and accountable approach to AI; inclusive improvements to the child tax credit; policy initiatives on homeownership and economic inclusion; and effective food and nutrition policies.
Across her roles, she has led successful efforts to ban a deadly dietary supplement, create legislation on several federal consumer complaints database for product safety; label crash test results on cars and sesame as an allergen on foods; enact auto safety standards that substantially reduced deaths in the U.S. and led to lasting innovations; and blocking school nutrition rollbacks that impacted 30 million kids, two-thirds of whom were lower-income.
A seasoned and supportive non-profit manager and strategist, she enjoys building strong and rigorous policy teams, writing, thought leadership, issue campaigning, and fundraising. A graduate of Stanford Law School and the University of Virginia, she has a passion for work that advances equity, fortifies democratic infrastructure, and encourages innovation, while assuring safety, accountability, and transparency.