Meet Our Staff

Conway Collis is President & CEO of the Mayor’s Fund for Los Angeles, where he developed and leads key homelessness prevention programs. Under his leadership, We Are LA — the Mayor’s Fund’s eviction and homelessness prevention program — has served more than 130,000 Angelenos and helped over 90,000 households stabilize their housing. He also leads the Transition Age Foster Youth program, which connects foster youth to the available resources and housing needed to build stable, independent lives.

His work at the Mayor’s Fund for LA is rooted in a long-standing commitment to advocacy that began while in college, when he worked for two years as a live-in counselor at a group home and school for at-risk foster youth. That experience shaped his focus on addressing immediate needs and impacting systemic change. It drove decades of work as an advocate, founder, and policymaker on poverty and inequality at the state and federal level.

As founding President and CEO of GRACE/End Child Poverty CA — which he led from inception in 2013 through 2021 — Conway led the development of and statewide advocacy for an anti-poverty plan. Forty-one of the plan’s 43 recommendations were fully or partially adopted by the State of California, with more than $20 billion in state funding dedicated to the recommended anti-poverty programs and initiatives. In 2019–20 alone, more than 290,000 California children and families moved out of poverty. To champion these and subsequent proposals, he built the End Child Poverty CA Coalition — co-chaired by Dolores Huerta along with 173 member organizations.

Collis was previously Senior Counsel and Chief Public Policy Officer for the Daughters of Charity Health System, where he created and guided enactment of state non-tax revenue legislation and the required federal approval. This legislation has provided $40 billion in federal funding to serve California Medicaid patients.

His public service has also extended into elected office. As an elected member and Chair of the California State Board of Equalization, he directed reform of the state sales and income tax bureaucracies and sponsored successful measures including the Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights, tax code enforcement of laws against discriminatory practices, and childcare tax credits. Following law school, he served as counsel on the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor and Public Welfare, working on domestic social programs, legal services, and related issues.

Throughout his career, Collis has also served in key leadership roles across nonprofit and civic institutions. He was the founding Board Chair of the National Foster Youth Institute from 2012 to 2021 and continues to serve on its Board; he co-chaired the CA Lifting Children and Families Out of Poverty Task Force and chaired the State Senate Bi-Partisan Task Force on Homelessness.

He is a graduate of Occidental College and Stanford Law School.