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spring 2026
Maura Sullivan, MPA ’10, works tirelessly to improve services for the 250,000 Massachusetss residents living with autism and intellectual and physical disabilities—and for their family members as well. Photograph by Michael J. Clarke
When Maura Sullivan, MPA ’10, talks about leadership and advocacy, she doesn’t start with titles, accomplishments, or awards, although she has earned many of those.
She starts with lived experience.
Decades before she became chief executive officer of The Arc of Massachusetts—the Commonwealth’s most influential advocacy organization serving the 250,000 residents living with autism and intellectual and developmental disabilities, along with their family members—Sullivan was a mother navigating a social services system that was confusing, fragmented, and often woefully unprepared to meet the needs of her young boys, both growing up with the challenges of intellectual disabilities and profound autism.
She arrived at Suffolk’s Master of Public Administration program in 2008 with a solid résumé in mental health and healthcare management. As a Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities (LEND) fellow at UMass Chan Medical School, Sullivan had developed a solid grasp of the state systems and services for developmentally disabled children. “I knew the gaps and barriers that people were facing, as I was living them myself,” she says. To help close those gaps, she realized she needed the kind of expertise in nonprofit governance, advocacy, and organizational design the MPA program could provide.
But it wasn’t an easy transition. “I didn’t have the confidence I needed when I started at Suffolk,” admits Sullivan. “My life was chaos at the time, and most of the time I just felt like an overwhelmed mom.”
Her loudest cheerleader during those years? The late Sandy Matava, MPA ’81, the highly regarded director of the Moakley Center for Public Management. (Matava, who passed away in 2024, is credited with mentoring a generation of public servants now serving across the Commonwealth.) When Sullivan doubted her abilities, Matava would have none of it. “Sandy would say to me, ‘Cut it out! You are in exactly the right position to make an impact!’” Sullivan recalls. “She exposed me to what it was possible to do, and so I came out of [Suffolk] with guns blazing.”
By Erica Noonan
Advocacy in action
The MPA’s emphasis on pragmatic leadership, coalition building, and policy implementation proved transformative. Shortly after graduating, Sullivan helped launch the Massachusetts Sibling Support Network, an innovative approach to supporting siblings of people with disabilities across the Commonwealth.
That momentum carried into full-time advocacy when she joined The Arc of Massachusetts in 2011 as a parent instructor for Operation House Call at Boston University’s Chobanian & Avedisian School of Medicine. She helped grow a relatively small enterprise into what’s now a nationally recognized medical-education program, connecting individuals with disabilities and their family members with more than a thousand future healthcare providers every year, so that doctors, nurses, and clinicians can better understand their lived experiences.
By 2015, she was serving as Arc’s director of government affairs and health policy and leading advocacy on several major legal reforms, including Nicky’s Law, a mandatory registry of caretakers who have substantiated cases of abuse against individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities, as well as a mandate for autism awareness training for all Massachusetts Police Academy cadets. She also led the efforts to pass Operation House Call legislation, codifying the program into law and securing state funding.
Arc eventually tapped her to become deputy executive director, and in November 2024 she was appointed CEO, overseeing a team of 20 advocacy, education, and resource professionals.
Sullivan acknowledges she took the reins at a challenging time.
A historically under-resourced landscape of services became even more acute during the pandemic. And now, she says, the federal crackdown on immigration, ongoing workforce shortages, and cost-of-living increases in Massachusetts have hammered the human-services workforce, a significant percentage of whom are immigrants and face potential deportation.
At the same time, the need for services has only become more pressing, with more than double the number of young Massachusetts residents entering the adult disability-services system each year compared to a decade ago, many with increasingly complex needs. (That includes Sullivan’s sons, Neil and Tyler, now in their 20s and navigating a confusing web of social services and MassHealth.)
Sullivan’s response embodies Matava’s commitment to building coalitions to better address systemic issues: She founded the Massachusetts Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Alliance, which brings the leaders of a dozen advocacy organizations together to speak with one voice to the governor and legislators.
“All of us are really concerned about the way the Medicaid cuts are coming down. MassHealth”—which relies on Medicaid reimbursements as well as state funding—“provides significant funding for all our long-term support, and our families and workforce rely on it,” she says. “We’ve seen through history that when state budgets get tightened, social services get impacted.”
Growing stresses on The system
Sullivan remains closely connected with Suffolk, as a member of the MPA’s advisory board and a guest lecturer on disability education for a popular class on social change and legislative advocacy taught by Professor Sonia Allyene, MPA ’01, executive in residence and the assistant chair of the Public Service and Healthcare Administration Program.
“Maura brings the urgency of social change to life,” Alleyne says. “She challenges students to understand the systemic barriers faced by individuals with disabilities and underscores why advocacy is essential to improving safety, access, and quality of life.”
Last spring, Sullivan was awarded the inaugural Sandy Matava Award for Public Service, which includes a $5,000 grant to advance public service initiatives. Sullivan says she is profoundly honored to be walking in Matava’s footsteps. “Sandy really built all of us up and gave us the tools we needed to succeed,” she says, in both the MPA program and in their public service roles. “I feel her spirit in my work every day.”
The spirit of public service