Susan Oliver grew up milking cows and raising calves on her family's dairy farm in rural upstate New York. Her favorite childhood play space was the huge haymow where she and her five siblings spent countless hours arranging hay bales into houses, forts and small villages and populating them with imaginary children and families. Since then, she has spent much of her career working in the not-for-profit sector to improve living and learning conditions for real kids and their families.
Today, as executive director of the national nonprofit organization Playing for Keeps, which promotes the importance of play in children's healthy development, she helps parents, teachers, the toy industry and others who care about kids understand what the research tells us about play and how to incorporate healthy play in the lives of today's children.
Ms. Oliver is a frequent speaker about the benefits of play at national and international conferences, including the National Association for the Education of Young Children, the Association for the Study of Play, the International Play Association, the International Toy Research Association and the American Specialty Toy Retailing Association on topics such as why play matters, the impact of children's entertainment on healthy play, using new partnerships to tell parents about play, how to assess children's learning through play and how play can respond to age-compression issues.
Ms. Oliver is also the author or co-author of many articles published about play in early childhood journals and toy industry publications on topics such as what the research tells us about play, the importance of constructive play in early childhood settings, how teachers can encourage parents to make more time for play at home, helping teachers become effective advocates for play-based learning in the classroom, and how to select play materials for the classroom. She has also written many articles for parents on ways to increase healthy play in family life. Many of these articles appear on Web sites of specialty toy stores and in newsletters distributed to parents by schools and human service programs.
She collaborated with professors Edward Zigler, Dorothy Singer and Sandra Bishop-Josef of Yale University on Children's Play: The Roots of Reading, and wrote the forward to that book. It was awarded Outstanding Academic Title honors by the American Library Association's Choice magazine in 2005 and is a best-seller for its publisher, Zero to Three. Ms. Oliver authored and/or reviewed all parent education content for Target stores' TargetBaby and TargetKids Web sites and wrote several mini-articles that appeared as sidebars in a recent Target catalog – efforts that cumulatively made an estimated 4.5 million impressions among families with children aged birth to five.
In addition to her leadership of Playing for Keeps, Ms. Oliver serves as executive vice president, national and community outreach, for the Ready to Learn Partnership, a project that is developing innovative new content for a literacy-promoting television program to launch on PBS in the fall of 2007, followed by the launch of a related play products line at Target in early 2008. She plans and implements parent-education strategies that use multi-platform children's entertainment properties as a base for helping low income families strengthen their preschoolers' emergent literacy skills.
Her experience includes management of marketing, business development and philanthropic development at the National Lekotek Center, which makes play accessible to children with disabilities, and at Family Support America, a national nonprofit committed to building community-based support and resources for children and families. Other positions have included general manager of a niche direct-marketing agency serving the heavy equipment industry, adjunct professor of Marketing at DePaul University, various annual giving positions at Boston University, and admissions officer at Harvard College.
Ms. Oliver is a past president of Women in Direct Marketing International (Chicago Chapter) and the Radcliffe Club of Chicago. She is a member of the Playing for Keeps Advisory Committee of the Association of Children's Museums. She holds a B.A. from Harvard University and an MBA from Boston University.
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