Over the course of her career Ms. Chieco has written reports, articles and proposals for a wide range of non-profit organizations and foundations. She has graduate degrees from Columbia University in social work, where she was selected for an internship at the Columbia University Business School’s Institute for Non-Profit Management, and journalism, where she received a Newsday Jaqueline Radin Award for Promising Women Journalists.
Originally from New York City, she directed an alternative to incarceration program for the Legal Aid Society, worked as a special assistant to the Deputy Mayor for Criminal Justice, and as a program officer with The New World Foundation, The New York Community Trust, and the Aaron Diamond Foundation. As a program officer, her areas of philanthropy included: peace and disarmament, public education, arts and culture, youth and children’s services, as well as a portfolio funding advocacy, healthcare and community organizing in the coal communities of Kentucky and West Virginia. While at these foundations she also maintained a freelance writing and consultant practice, which she continued after moving to Washington, DC in 1991. Clinical work included counseling with pre-adolescents at Children’s Village, a residential foster care facility in Dobbs Ferry, New York, and with incarcerated youth and their families.
She is the primary author on three major studies: a nationwide survey of community groups for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development titled: Initiatives for Community Self-Help: Efforts to Increase Recognition and Support, and a report: Mission Possible: 200 Ways to Strengthen the Nonprofit Sector’s Infrastructure for the Union Institute’s Office of Social Responsibility, as well as a 1989 study entitled: AIDS, Community Needs and Private Funding: A Needs Assessment for New York City commissioned by The New York City Aids Fund.
In the past several years she has worked as a Middle and Upper School counselor at Washington Latin Public Charter School, and as an expository writing consultant for the St. Albans school. She is also a potter whose work has sold at the gift shops at the Phillips Gallery and the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Past and current board memberships include the American Initiative for Italian Culture, Appalshop, The American Forum, and the Educational Video Center.