Dr. Melody Curtiss, esq.

Executive Director/CEO:

Melody Curtiss has forty years of experience in organizational management, strategic planning, nonprofit financial governance, and program development. Before coming to Helping Children Worldwide, she worked as administrative counsel, legislative liaison and legal advisor in Olympia, Washington and Topeka, Kansas for two different government agencies. She has 30 years experience working in program development, outreach and development for nonprofits, 25 years of them as executive director, and 10 more as organizational manager, consultant and project lead for government, development organizations, and businesses. The other 5 were in litigation and mediation – what Melody likes to call “conflict creation and conflict resolution.”

Melody obtained her Bachelors Degree, teaching qualifications and Juris Doctorate from Washburn University in Kansas and a post-doctoral certificate in nonprofit financial governance from Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government.

She lives in Manassas, VA., sharing her home with her youngest daughter, a very spoiled miniature schnoodle, her eldest daughter and 4 more members of her extended family. She is an active volunteer in her community in the greater Washington, D.C. area, previously serving as Treasurer for her home congregation – Ner Shalom (which translates to “light of peace”), is a member of the American Armed Services Arts Partnership Comedy Bootcamp Alumni, the Unity Against Hate collaboratives, and a published author “always working on the next book.” She enjoys learning something new daily, listening to “every kind of music” and visiting with her large, diverse family. (22 grandchildren, and seven siblings)

Her undergraduate major was Theatre, interrupted briefly for a tour of duty with the Unites States Marines. She worked as a professional stage director, set designer and costumer, wrote and produced a play before taking a right turn in her career to get her teaching certificate and then two years later, returned to school again to take a complete left turn – toward law, legislation, policy, nonprofit management and children’s rights advocacy. Melody likes to say that “nothing I ever did in my life was a waste of time. I couldn’t do the job I do today, if I hadn’t done all the other things I did before.”

Besides the normal Executive Director functions of leading the organization, Melody leverages her diverse background and interests to do what she likes to call “other duties as assigned to myself” to reduce the organization’s overhead, including website design. Melody Co-hosts the Optimistic Voices Child’s View Podcast with our current Youth Host, and is the sound engineer for all Optimistic Voices Podcast. She also designs, writes, and illustrates the children’s books series that goes along with the Child’s View episodes, is the Publisher of Empower! magazine, and the author of the Family Resilience Through Play parenting Manual.