Michelle Woods Matthews

MPA (Fellows), 2023

Communications Director, City of Norwalk (CT)

Michelle Woods Matthews is the Communications Director for the City of Norwalk, CT, in Mayor Harry Rilling’s Office. In her role, she is the primary spokesperson for the Mayor and responsible for implementing strategic communications that align with the Mayor’s vision, including increasing access to affordable housing, environmentally friendly infrastructure and high-quality public schools.

Prior to this role, Michelle worked for the State of Connecticut’s Office of the Treasurer as Press Secretary, managing communications including CT Baby Bonds, a racial-equity, anti-poverty program, which was the first of its kind to become law in the nation. Prior to that, Michelle resided in Washington D.C., where she worked at Planned Parenthood of Metropolitan Washington and NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia, advocating for policies that increased access to reproductive healthcare at the local, state and federal levels.

Michelle earned a Masters in Bilingual and Multicultural Education at la Universidad de Alcalá de Henares in Spain and a Bachelor of Arts in International Affairs and Modern Foreign Languages from James Madison University.

In her current local government role, Michelle uses her analytical and organizational management skills from UConn’s MPA program to inform the public about programs and policies that directly benefit them. Michelle emphasizes how UConn’s Finance and Budgeting course gave her a better understanding of how public finance policies at the local level affect residents more than any other level of government. While communicating about new policies to residents, she also uses the knowledge she gained from her applied quantitative methods class that taught her how to analyze numerical data to identify cause-and-effect relationships among desired policy outcomes.

In her free time, Michelle enjoys mentoring young women, swimming and traveling to places she’s never been.