Barbara Best
Director of Foundation Relations and Special Projects

Barbara Best is CDF’s Director of Foundation Relations and Special Projects.  She works to cultivate and steward relationships with funders and community partners and coordinates special projects of strategic importance to CDF, including taking CDF’s All Healthy Children Campaign, a school based outreach initiative designed to link every eligible child with health coverage, to scale.

Barbara spent ten years in CDF’s Texas office, rising from an outreach coordinator to Texas Executive Director, where she oversaw offices in Houston, Austin and the Rio Grande Valley region along the Mexican border and mobilized regional coordinators in ten Texas cities to restore health coverage to 175,000 uninsured Texas children.

She came to CDF after serving as a Jesuit volunteer to work with refugees at Catholic Charities and coordinated legislative affairs for the Houston Area Women's Center, a domestic violence and sexual assault shelter.

Barbara is a British American Project Fellow and American Leadership Forum Fellow and was profiled as one of 20 international advocates, and the only American, by the World Health Organization as part of the "Voices from the Frontline" web series on international efforts to improve access to health care.

She received her bachelor’s degree from Duke University in 1995 and a Master in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School in 2010.  While at the Kennedy School, she served as the first Mid-Career Fellow in the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management and held a half-day summit at Harvard Law School, Coming Together to Dismantle the Cradle to Prison Pipeline with 300 community, faith and policy leaders.

Barbara works in Cambridge, MA.