Rachel Kaganoff Stern

In addition to serving as the CEO of the Junior State of America, Rachel Kaganoff Stern serves on the board of the Santa Barbara City College Foundation, and the Board of the Santa Barbara Symphony. She just completed six years of service on the Board of the Sanford Public Policy School at Duke University. She spent five years as a board member and member of the Executive Committee of the Alliance for College Ready Schools, and served for eleven years on the Women in Leadership Steering Committee at Princeton University. She is the former Co-Chair of the Women’s Political Committee, a Los Angeles-based political action committee that raises money for Democratic women candidates for office. She was a long-time member of the Board of Planned Parenthood’s Advocacy Project.

Rachel spent 15 years as an Associate Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. She worked across a number of research areas including health care, civil justice, and national security policy. Her primary responsibilities were to design and implement case studies. Her final project at RAND was a two-year study evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the programs used to compensate losses resulting from the September 11 Terrorist Attacks (*Compensation for Losses from the 9/11 Attacks, *RAND 2004). Prior to working at RAND Rachel spent two years working as a researcher at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Washington, D.C. Rachel graduated magna cum laude with an A.B. in Politics from Princeton University and has a master’s degree in Public Policy from Duke University.

Rachel was a member of JSA from 1978 to 1982, serving on State Cabinet in a number of positions, and as Chapter President at Dos Pueblos High School in Goleta, California. She attended Summer School at U.C. Davis in 1980, and attended the first Washington D.C. Summer School in 1981. She worked as a Resident Advisor for the Junior State at UC Davis, Stanford and Georgetown, and in 2014 she served as Interim Program Director for the Southern California region. Rachel served on the JSA Board of Directors for nine years, serving first as National Fundraising Chair, then Vice President of the Board, and served three years as President of the Board.