Laura Green Zeilinger
Laura Green Zeilinger is Senior Vice President of Community Impact & Resident Services at Enterprise Community Partners, where she leads Resident Services across Enterprise Community Development and helps advance key components of Enterprise’s national strategy. She joined Enterprise in 2025, first as a consultant and then as Interim SVP, where she led development of a five-year, resident-driven strategic plan and strengthened the organization’s operations and team alignment to position ECD as a model for resident-centered community development.
Before joining Enterprise, Laura served for a decade as Director of the District of Columbia Department of Human Services (DHS), where she was responsible for guiding the Department’s 1,500 personnel and a budget of $933 million, providing support and assistance to more than 275,000 District residents.
Laura is a collaborative leader with a track record of strengthening organizations and tackling complex problems through cross-systems collaboration, while keeping the people closest to the work at the center of policy design and decision making.
Throughout her career, Laura has focused on designing and implementing solutions to complex societal challenges. With a particular focus on workforce development, Laura collaborated with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta to design Career MAP, a groundbreaking pilot program that addressed benefit cliffs and opened pathways to economic security for families with histories of homelessness. Her efforts also resulted in significant reforms to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, including strengthening employment and education programs, eliminating the 60-month time limit, and integrating whole-family approaches to align families’ employment and education goals.
Under her leadership at DHS, the District achieved a 73 percent reduction in family homelessness between 2016 and 2024 and the effective end of chronic family homelessness. She also spearheaded youth diversion programs in partnership with public schools, the Attorney General’s Office, and law enforcement agencies, helping young people and their families access pathways to safe and healthy development. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she maintained continuity of critical supports by establishing isolation and quarantine sites, launching a virtual family assistance center, and expanding food distribution networks.
Before her appointment as DHS Director, Laura served as Executive Director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness (USICH), where she worked closely with 19 federal agencies and with state, local, and private sector partners to implement Opening Doors, the Federal Strategic Plan to Prevent and End Homelessness. She also has experience in international economic development, having managed a technical assistance project to reform the pension system in the Republic of Kazakhstan.
Laura is part of the team at Harvard’s Leadership for a Networked World co-leading the Leaders Activation Lab, an initiative supporting human services executive leaders through applied coaching and peer learning.
