Ron Mirr is a private consultant based in Iowa City who has worked as a mental health clinician, a school administrator, a staff developer, a grant writer, and a consultant to agencies in many states and internationally.

Ron holds a Master’s Degree in Social Work and has 40 years of experience working with PK-12 schools and social service agencies. He has been a national leader in the area of family engagement for the past 25 years. From 2015-2019, Ron was a Senior Vice President for Scholastic Education where he led the FACE (Family and Community Engagement) consulting and professional services business. 

He is a co-founder of CAFÉ—the Center for Active Family Engagement—a national consulting group that provides training and technical assistance on effective parent and family engagement strategies. CAFÉ’s signature product is the Family Engagement Assessment (FEA), which provides schools with quantitative and qualitative data about the effectiveness of their current family engagement efforts. Ron was also the founder of the Iowa Parent Information Resource Center in 1995, which he led for nearly 16 years. For the past 20 years, Ron has been a frequent collaborator with Dr. Karen Mapp (Harvard Graduate School of Education). Ron is an expert on the Dual Capacity-Building Framework for Family-School Partnerships and continues to collaborate with both Dr. Mapp and Dr. Bergman (co-authors of the framework). 

Throughout his career, Ron has worked with many large districts (e.g., New York City, Los Angeles, Miami, Seattle, Austin, Baltimore, and Boston) as well as smaller suburban and rural districts to help schools in these districts build strong relationships with families and create home-school partnerships that make a difference to student learning and well-being. 

Since 1987 Ron has written and received over 200 federal, state, and private grants totaling $134,631,599. Ron has taught a graduate course in Grant Writing for the University of Iowa for over 20 years.