MEET OUR TEAM

Marc Stier is a long-time activist, teacher, and writer. Before becoming the executive director of the Pennsylvania Policy Center, he was director of the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center from 2015 to 2023 and chair of the We The People–PA campaign from 2018 to 2023; executive director of Penn Action; the Pennsylvania director of health care for America Now, which led the grassroots effort in support of what became the Affordable Care Act in the state; and the Health Care campaign manager for SEIU Pennsylvania State Council.

Jeff Garis is the outreach and partnerships director at the Pennsylvania Policy Center, drawing on his quarter-century of experience working with advocacy organizations in Pennsylvania. For the decade prior to joining the Pennsylvania Policy Center, Jeff worked for the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center and Keystone Research Center, coordinating advocacy campaigns focused on state and federal policy priorities. Previously, he worked with diverse coalitions for several years as the field director of Pennsylvania Voice, the state political director of America Votes, and the executive director of Penn Action. Jeff began his advocacy career in 1998, serving as the executive director of a statewide death penalty reform organization. He lives in Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood, where he enjoys live music, standup comedy, cooking, and bicycling.

Before joining the Pennsylvania Policy Center as director of communications, Kirstin served as the communications director for both the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center and the Keystone Research Center. She comes with over 25 years of experience in marketing, advertising, public relations, and crisis communications in the public, private, corporate, political, and nonprofit sectors. Some of her former roles are managing accounts for advertisers, including the Got Milk? campaign, FORD, Arby’s, the Beef Council, FILA, and McCormick. She was director of marketing and communications for Highmark Blue Shield; director of communications for Governor Ed Rendell’s administration; and a weekly columnist with a progressive perspective for the Patriot-News. She’s worked with progressive and high-level leaders, including President Barack Obama, President Joe Biden, and President Bill Clinton.

Before joining the Pennsylvania Policy Center, Erica was deputy director of communications at the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center and Keystone Research Center. Previously, she’d spent years as a fundraising researcher in various Philadelphia nonprofits such as the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center and The Curtis Institute of Music. She was a copy editor at The Philadelphia Tribune, the oldest, continuously Black-owned newspaper in the U.S., and then ran her own copy editing business, specializing in academic writing and both fiction and nonfiction writing translated from other languages.

From 2013 to 2021, she co-ran the blog Dark Matters about people of color and genre (horror, sci-fi, fantasy, science/tech, etc.) media. Dark Matters provided historical and current cultural information and was an online advocate for improving POC visibility in genre media and for people seeking information and safety while protesting the rash of police brutality during that time.

Adrienne Standley is the deputy design and digital director for the Pennsylvania Policy Center and a passionate harm reductionist and LGBTQ+ rights activist living in Philadelphia. They’re a policy nerd and community organizer with a fine art degree from Arcadia University and additional experience in small business operations, management, and e-commerce.

Dwayne J. Heisler serves as the campaign director for the Pennsylvania Policy Center, where he leverages more than two decades of experience in political organizing and progressive leadership. With deep expertise in state-level lobbying, legislative strategy, and coalition building, Dwayne has successfully led numerous campaigns focused on advancing key progressive policies in Pennsylvania.

Before joining the Pennsylvania Policy Center as director of policy and research, Laura served as a post-doctoral associate at the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University, where she conducted state-level research on child care policy, labor market outcomes, and gender equity. Previously, she was a fellow at Voices for Utah Children, where she worked on economic justice initiatives related to family well-being and early childhood education. Laura holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Utah and an undergraduate degree in quantitative economics and econometrics from the University of South Florida. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as the Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy, and Œconomia.

Castin Stone is a policy analyst with the Pennsylvania Policy Center. Before joining the Center, he worked in Addison County, Vermont, in order to assess housing needs and water quality while working on his degree in environmental studies and geology at Middlebury College. Castin is passionate about geographic data analysis, best practices in data governance, and making opaque statistics into accurate and compelling stories.