Leadership
Amber Payne is a macro social work and public health leader with more than 19 years of experience building the systems, funding models, and evaluation infrastructure that support young children and families. Her work spans direct practice, program evaluation, and policy across South Carolina, Georgia, Iowa, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Oregon, Texas, and Montana. She is Founder and President of AP Community Partners, a consulting firm providing services across the country to nonprofits, foundations, and government agencies.
As Project Director of Invest Early NC, Amber leads a 19-member early childhood funders collaborative advancing systems change, funder engagement, and policy advocacy across North Carolina. She architected the collaborative's statewide pooled fund for systems change, helped raise more than $3 million in new investment, and helped to establish the state's first childcare-focused government liaison position, the Philanthropy Business Liaison — a public-private partnership bridging North Carolina's Division of Child Development and Early Education (DCDEE) and the NC Department of Commerce to advance childcare affordability and access. Through her leadership, alongside collaborative funders and AFTON Partners, the collaborative is guiding development of a 10-year statewide advocacy plan aligning the collaborative with North Carolina's broader funder and advocacy ecosystem, and helped establish, fund, and embed a statewide public health messaging campaign built on Harvard's evidence-based “The Basics” framework within North Carolina's Smart Start Network and local health care institutions to shift caregiver mental models around early brain development. Together, the liaison position, messaging campaign, and advocacy plan will help advance a systems-change ecosystem with impact spanning grassroots to grasstops stakeholders.
As Chief Quality Officer at the Center for Child Counseling, Amber leads quality assurance, program evaluation, and continuous quality improvement for the organization's infant and early childhood mental health prevention and intervention programming — including a Theory of Change and 81-indicator evaluation framework she developed, and a data dashboard she built to track outcomes for more than 10,000 unduplicated clients.
Earlier in her career, Amber served as CBCAP Director for South Carolina, where she leveraged more than $2 million in federal prevention funding, and managed a $1.2 million SAMHSA Substance Abuse Prevention Block Grant subcontract across six regions of Georgia. She has served as lead evaluator for statewide home visitation and parenting programs, including Healthy Families Home Visitation and the Nurturing Parenting Program, and developed ACEs prevention training content and curricula for Prevent Child Abuse Iowa and other state partners.
Amber holds a Master of Social Work and a Master of Public Health from the University of South Carolina, and a Bachelor of Arts from Clemson University. She is an Internationally Certified Prevention Specialist and a certified facilitator in the Nurturing Parenting Program, Parents as Teachers, and Healthy Families home visitation models. She has presented her work nationally and internationally, including invited podium presentations at the World Association for Infant Mental Health (WAIMH) Congress in Dublin, Ireland; the Iowa ACEs 360 Summit; and Lead the Fight, hosted by the Center for Child Counseling in Palm Beach County, FL.
