ABOUT LAURA
Laura Buckley (she/her), Founder and Managing Director of Buckley Collaborative, is a passionate and strengths-based leader who has demonstrated experience empowering individuals, building successful teams, implementing effective programs, and creating lasting impact. Laura uses her social work background and years as a direct-care provider and non-profit leader to support whole-person care across systems. Laura honed these skills working across the globe in various sectors, including healthcare, housing, behavioral health, criminal justice, and child welfare.
Laura has built numerous powerful community-based, intersectional programs. Notably, she integrated housing + healthcare for chronically unhoused individuals with multiple chronic conditions and frequent hospitalizations in Camden, NJ; brought more compassion to pregnant people with substance use disorder and showed the importance of data to promote equity in program design in a partnership with an addiction medicine clinic; and launched a Medical-Legal Partnership to integrate attorneys into a nationally-recognized complex care program ensuring more than 100 individuals could access free legal services regardless of healthcare condition or legal issue. In Spring 2020, Laura worked closely with NJ County and State leaders to quickly and effectively establish a response for unhoused individuals who tested positive for COVID.
Laura has also worked at the intersection of healthcare + criminal justice by standing up a pilot program for individuals with frequent use of Camden County hospitals and jail, as well as facilitating individual case management and group support inside and outside of the Philadelphia Prison System.
Laura has also created effective public policy campaigns and promoted collective mobilization efforts in the US and abroad. In 2013, she co-founded Better Bail, an initiative to establish an online bail payment system to reduce 6,000+ pretrial population, which has since been adopted by the City of Philadelphia. She studied effective collective mobilization efforts with a sex worker collective in Kolkata, India and used that to promote workers rights for other unorganized, primarily non-male labor, including domestic workers. Laura also co-designed an initiative to promote reproductive health and access for South African girls.
With her dedication to data and research, she has published multiple peer-reviewed research papers and spoken at numerous national conferences. She received her Master of Social Work from the University of Pennsylvania with a clinical concentration and a Bachelor of Arts from New York University. In 2020, she was selected and funded to participate in The Coaching Fellowship, a national organization designed to enhance leadership skills to create deeper social impact. She received a certificate in Motivational Interviewing from Rutgers University Behavioral Health in 2018 and 2020, a certificate in Mindfulness for Healthcare Providers from the University of Pennsylvania in 2015, and her Yoga Teacher certification in 2014.