Bio
Madeleine Thakur is president & CEO of The Children’s Movement of Florida, a statewide advocacy organization focused on the policies and investments that help each child in Florida thrive in their first five years.
Together with her colleagues, she illuminates the hidden power of all children reaching their full potential—for their own success in life, for the strength of our communities, and for the muscle of our workforce and economy.
Madeleine leads The Movement’s state-level policy efforts, building strong relationships with elected officials, and in turn, educating and informing the public about early childhood issues being addressed in the legislature. She provides strategic direction for the business engagement initiative Bosses for Babies, the early literacy mentorship program ReadingPals, and the community-centered work of The Future Project – amplifying the voices of parents and educators to reimagine the future of early learning in Florida.
She serves on the Board of Trustees of the Florida Chamber Foundation, the state advisory board for the Florida Early Childhood Comprehensive Systems (ECCS) impact project, and participates in numerous local collaboratives focused on kindergarten readiness, child care, and children’s health care. Notably, she is a steering committee member and policy co-chair for the Miami-Dade Mayor’s Blue Ribbon Commission for Children, having also co-led program development for the inaugural Mayor’s Children’s Summit to introduce the county Roadmap to Child Success in 2022. Madeleine also chairs the Florida Early Learning Consortium, whose members represent parents, small business owners and nonprofit child care operators, early childhood funders, and the early childhood workforce, whose focus is on legislative advocacy.
A Miami native and one of five children, Madeleine was raised trilingual (English, Spanish, French) and is a proud graduate of Miami-Dade County Public Schools. She holds a B.A. in International Studies from the University of Chicago and a diploma from Sciences Po in Paris.
A strong supporter of opportunities for youth, she served for two years as a counselor for an after-school program on Chicago’s South Side and spent one year as a teacher’s assistant in the English-as-a-Second-Language classroom of a Chicago elementary school. When she returned to Miami, Madeleine was a volunteer tutor at the Overtown Youth Center for several years. She is also a former ReadingPal at Centro Mater in Little Havana. For her impact and potential, she was chosen as a Class XI Miami Fellow, participating in a leadership program that used the local community (and Medellin, Colombia) as a learning laboratory.
Before joining The Movement in September 2017 as chief of staff to then-CEO Vance Aloupis, Madeleine spent nearly a decade focused on economic and social development in Latin America and the Caribbean, working closely with senior executives in the legal, tech, consumer goods, and financial sectors.
She and her husband, Mike, live in Miami with their two young sons.