Tara Oakman is the Senior Vice President of Strategic Initiatives at The Rippel Foundation, leading the programmatic and strategic partnerships work at the organization.

Before coming to Rippel, Tara was a senior fellow and director of health equity and reform at The Century Foundation (TCF), a progressive policy think tank. There, her work focused on helping shape a more equitable, accessible and affordable health care system that centers the needs of patients and workers. For ten years prior to joining TCF, Tara was at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), the nation’s largest health and health care philanthropy, where she was most recently the interim managing director of the RWJF’s Transforming Health and Healthcare Systems thematic area. In that role, she led the strategy development and implementation planning for how RWJF can work to address the structural racism being perpetuated in health care and public health systems and the resulting major health inequities. While at RWJF, Tara also led much of the portfolio of work on access, affordability, and equity of Medicaid and Marketplace coverage in states.

Prior to RWJF, Tara worked for several years in the federal U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, including overseeing implementation of some of the formative consumer protections and market reform regulations included in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). She also worked on execution of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) when it was first developed and served as a program analyst in the HHS Budget Office with responsibility for evaluating the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention budget. 

Tara received a BA in political science from Brown University, a master’s degree in public policy from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and a PhD in health care policy from Harvard University. She has written and lectured on issues related to coverage, reproductive and maternal health, health care workers, philanthropy, and a host of other issues.

Tara lives in Princeton, New Jersey, with her husband, twins, and two very loud but also very adorable dogs. She is on a quest to travel to all 50 states, and is making steady improvements in understanding gen alpha vocabulary in order to communicate with her kids. Just ask her what a rizzler is.