JOYCE S. JOHNSON has been a neighborhood resident and activist for 21 years. She is the proud mother of Stephanie and doting grandmother of Todd, Cori and Devin. As head of a highly regarded educational consulting firm, Joyce has worked with various NYC school districts to maximize student achievement. She will focus attention on the most urgent policy issue we face today – improvement of our public education system.

Joyce’s activism was inspired by her parents, Columbus and Dorothy Stanley. In 1957, the Stanleys helped found the Poughkeepsie Voters League, a grassroots organization which empowered Poughkeepsie’s black population for the first time. Columbus was the first African American elected to public office in the Hudson Valley. Dorothy was the first African American to teach in the Poughkeepsie public schools, eventually becoming a school principal.

Joyce is: a former Democratic District Leader; past Chair and a current member of Community Board 7; a Strycker’s Bay Neighborhood Council board member; a former Mitchell-Lama Residents Coalition Executive Board member; and a 30-year Sister of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., a national public service organization she joined after completing her degree in Microbiology at Howard University.

Joyce is Executive Vice President of the National Women’s Political Caucus/Manhattan and an outspoken defender of a woman’s right to choose. Joyce has been: Director of Equal Employment Opportunity for Joseph E. Seagram & Sons; Special Assistant to former Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger; Consultant to Mayor Dinkins’s Office of Children and Families; Director of Community Relations for New York City Comptroller Alan Hevesi; and Executive Assistant to New York City Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew. Joyce directed the Chancellor’s Office of Business and Community Relations and worked with his Parent Advisory Council and the United Parent Association. Joyce is deeply committed to a progressive agenda that emphasizes the need to maintain the District’s affordable housing stock and develop programs and services that will keep ours a vital and diverse community.

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