About Lorraine
Producing Better Results for Citizens
Lorraine Chang is a consultant to government, non-profit and community leaders. She is associated with The Public Strategies Group, a firm that specializes in “reinventing government” and designing creative solutions for public organizations that want to produce better results for citizens. During her over 30-year career, she has been a lawyer, business executive, and non-profit and government leader. Because of her life-long commitment to high quality education, she wants to apply the knowledge and skills she has gained over the years to help make the Learning Community a success.
Experienced Public & Private Sector Leader
Lorraine served as Associate Assistant Secretary for the Employment and Training Administration of the U.S. Department of Labor, where she led the agency’s labor-management team responsible for reinventing federal workforce development programs. She has also been involved in major transformation initiatives at the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Federal Student Aid, the State of Iowa and in her work locally with Nebraska Health & Human Services and United Way. Lorraine spent 13 years with the Union Pacific Railroad Company as an attorney and Marketing & Sales executive. She pioneered transportation contracts as a new way of doing business, introduced total quality management principles and tools, and led a task force designed to improve the quality of the railroad’s service to Toyota. She began her career as an attorney with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, spending one year on Capitol Hill as a Congressional Fellow through the American Political Science Association. Her experiences in the public and private sectors provided valuable insights into how to bring about results-based transformational change.
Active School and Community Volunteer
Throughout the 30 years that she has lived in Omaha, Lorraine has been engaged in a broad range of civic and community activities. She has been an active volunteer at her children’s schools, including service as President of the Harrison Elementary School PTA, Co-chair of the Central High PEP Auction Event, and volunteer Swim Mom at Westside High School. She has been a volunteer reader for the National Education Association’s “Read Across America” event. She served on the Steering & Policy Committee of the Building Bright Futures initiative, is a member of the Women’s Fund’s Ready To Run Steering Committee, and is a board member of the Conference for Inclusive Communities. She served as a member of the Omaha City Charter Review Commission, and has been an active supporter of and participant in the Omaha Chamber of Commerce’s “Principal for a Day” and Leadership Omaha programs. She was President of Ballet Omaha, and Co-founder and President of the Omaha Modern Dance Collective.
A Family Committed to Education
Lorraine received her undergraduate degree in political science from the University of Rochester and a law degree from George Washington University. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska, with her husband, Eric Pearson, a law professor at Creighton University. They have two children, Scott and Julia, who attended Harrison Elementary School and Lewis & Clark Middle School. Scott graduated from Omaha Central High School, Boston College, and Chicago-Kent Law School and is an attorney with SFX Baseball in Chicago. Julia graduated from Westside High School and is a Marketing & Management major at Saint Louis University.
