Elise Legault
Senior Director for Policy, North America
Montreal, QC
Elise leads our policy work across the U.S. and Canada, producing research, briefs, and data to support our campaigns, and helping identify which issues serve ONE’s mission and are ripe for advocacy in the North American context.
A native of Montreal, she joined ONE in 2018 and played various roles covering policy, government relations, and leading the Canada team.
Before ONE, Elise worked at UNESCO, first as a researcher and writer for their Education for All Global Monitoring Report in Paris, and then as the Education Finance Programme Specialist at the UNESCO Institute for Statistics. Before that, she was a policy officer for ActionAid International in London, where she got her introduction to global advocacy, and as a grants coordinator for Concern Universal in The Gambia, West Africa, where she lived for two years.
Elise has a Masters in Public Policy and Administration from the London School of Economics, and a Bachelor’s degree in International Development from McGill University. She was not always destined for a wonky career in international development, however–in her younger days, she was a stage lighting technician and toured the U.S. for 2 years with Cirque du Soleil. She sometimes thinks about how she would have lived a very different life if she had stayed on that path…