Dr. Maya Michelle Rockeymoore Cummings (born January 31, 1971) is an American political scientist, public health advocate, technology entrepreneur, and author. She is the founder and chief executive officer of HyperVigilant, a health technology company developing artificial intelligence tools to detect and manage cardiometabolic health risks.
She is the author of RAGEism: Racism, Ageism and the Quest for Liberation Democracy, which coined the term "rageism" to describe the compounding structural harm produced by the simultaneous operation of racism and ageism across political institutions and public policy.
Over a career spanning more than three decades, Rockeymoore Cummings has worked as a congressional staffer, nonprofit leader, public health program director, think tank founder, academic fellow, and entrepreneur.
She previously served as a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and as a Visiting Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University SNF Agora Institute. She founded Global Policy Solutions (2005) and the Center for Global Policy Solutions (2012), organizations focused on economic inequality, health disparities, and social insurance policy. Her commentary has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, Forbes, CNN, MS NOW, Fox News, BBC, and Al Jazeera.
She served as chair of the Maryland Democratic Party from 2018 to 2019.
Early life and career
Rockeymoore Cummings was born in Wichita Falls, Texas. She is the daughter of Thomas Rockeymoore of San Antonio, Texas, and Hazel Rockeymoore (d. 2015). Her father served as president of the local San Antonio NAACP chapter and led the Bexar County Democratic Party in the mid-1990s, and was a volunteer with COPS/Metro Alliance. Her mother was a lifetime NAACP member, an ACLU member, and worked for the election of President Barack Obama.
She is the fourth generation from slavery on her mother's side; her parents were raised in the Jim Crow South a personal history that has directly informed her scholarship on structural racism, ageism, and their compounding effects on marginalized communities.
As the daughter of a United States Air Force officer, Rockeymoore Cummings spent her childhood living across the United States and abroad as a result of her father's military assignments, attending John Jay High School in San Antonio, Texas, where she was later honored as a Pillar of Character by the Northside Education Foundation.
She earned a Bachelor of Arts in political science and mass communications from Prairie View A&M University, a historically Black university in Texas. She subsequently received a Master of Arts and a Ph.D. in political science from Purdue University, where her graduate studies encompassed American politics, international relations, public policy, and African American studies. Her dissertation, The African American Political Response to HIV/AIDS: A Case Study of the Congressional Black Caucus in the 105th Congress, examined the intersection of race, legislative politics, and public health policy.
Purdue University honored her with its Distinguished Alumni Award in 2022. She was also named an Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow in 2004, a selective leadership development program for mid-career entrepreneurs and civic innovators.
Career
Congressional career Following graduate school, Rockeymoore Cummings built a career on Capitol Hill. From 1997 to 1998 she served as a Congressional Black Caucus Legislative Fellow in the Office of Congressman Melvin Watt (D-NC), advising the Member on Social Security, health, welfare, Medicare, and Medicaid policy.
She then joined the professional staff of the House Committee on Ways and Means, Social Security Subcommittee, where she produced policy analysis on Social Security benefits and related legislative proposals and helped build coalitions among advocacy organizations with a shared interest in strengthening the Social Security system.
From 1999 to 2000 she served as Administrative Assistant and Chief of Staff in the Office of Congressman Charles Rangel (D-NY), managing a staff of fourteen and a budget of more than $1 million. In that role she helped facilitate passage of the African Growth and Opportunity Act and oversaw constituent services and legislative operations.
She has testified before both chambers of the United States Congress on multiple occasions, providing expert testimony on Social Security policy and its implications for vulnerable populations and the middle class. Her formal appearances include testimony before the U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Social Security, on May 17, 2005, in a hearing titled First Do No Harm: Protecting and Strengthening Social Security’s Value for Vulnerable Populations. She later testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, Subcommittee on Social Security, Pensions, and Family Policy, on May 21, 2014, in a hearing entitled “How Structural Factors Drive the Need to Expand Social Security Benefits for Future Retirees.” More recently, she appeared again before the U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Social Security, on March 12, 2019, in a hearing titled “Protecting and Improving Social Security: Enhancing Social Security to Strengthen the Middle Class.”
Early policy and advocacy career From 2001 to 2003 Rockeymoore Cummings served as Senior Resident Scholar at the National Urban League Institute for Opportunity and Equality in Washington, D.C. In that role she served as principal investigator for a $1.5 million federally funded program focused on diabetes prevention and control among underserved populations work that foreshadowed her later focus on cardiometabolic health technology.
From 2003 to 2005 she served as Vice President for Research and Programs at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, where she established the research and policy agenda for the Foundation's Center for Policy Analysis and Research, authored and commissioned several influential policy studies, and co-wrote grants totaling more than $1.2 million.
Policy research organizations
Global Policy Solutions In 2005, Rockeymoore Cummings founded Global Policy Solutions LLC, a public policy consultancy providing research, program development, and strategic communications services to nonprofit organizations, foundations, corporations, and government agencies on issues including health equity, economic opportunity, and community development. Representative clients have included the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, the Alliance for Excellent Education, and the National League of Cities Institute for Youth Education and Families.
Center for Global Policy Solutions In 2012, Rockeymoore Cummings established the Center for Global Policy Solutions, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit think tank that produced research on economic inequality, racial health disparities, and structural barriers to social mobility in the United States. She led the organization as president until it was voluntarily dissolved by its board of directors in October 2021.
The Center's signature initiative was the Closing the Racial Wealth Gap Initiative, a Ford Foundation-funded national collaborative that Rockeymoore Cummings co-directed, conducted in partnership with the Insight Center for Community Economic Development.
The Initiative's flagship publication was Beyond Broke: Why Closing the Racial Wealth Gap is a Priority for National Economic Security (Center for Global Policy Solutions, May 2014), co-authored by Rockeymoore Cummings with Rebecca Tippett, Avis Jones-DeWeever, Darrick Hamilton, and William A. Darity Jr. Drawing on U.S. Census Bureau data and the National Asset Scorecard in Communities of Color, the report documented that in the recovery period following the Great Recession, the average African American and Latino household held only six and seven cents respectively for every dollar of wealth held by the typical white family, and that over two-thirds of African Americans and nearly three-quarters of Latinos were "liquid asset poor." The report received national coverage including segments on MSNBC and in the Detroit Free Press, National Catholic Reporter, and BlackPressUSA, and was presented at the 2014 Color of Wealth Summit at the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center.
Among the Center's other publications was Stick Shift: Autonomous Vehicles, Driving Jobs, and the Future of Work (2017), which she co-authored the first study to examine the labor market impact of level-5 autonomous vehicle technology in the United States, finding that approximately 4 million driving jobs were at risk of displacement.
In 2019, The Washington Post reported on financial management concerns at the Center, including accounting irregularities between the nonprofit and Rockeymoore Cummings's affiliated consulting firm. Following a formal audit of the Center's Form 990 returns for the tax period ended December 31, 2018, the Internal Revenue Service issued a no-change determination, stating: "We accepted your forms as filed," and confirming that the organization "continued to qualify for exemption from federal income tax" until its voluntary dissolution on October 21, 2021.
Social insurance and economic policy Social Security and retirement security policy has been a central thread throughout Rockeymoore Cummings's career, from her earliest work as a congressional staffer through three decades of research, testimony, and public advocacy. She served as co-chair of the Commission to Modernize Social Security, a bipartisan body convened to examine long-term policy options for strengthening the Social Security system. She also served as chair of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, one of the nation's leading advocacy organizations on these issues.
In 2010, she co-authored Tough Times Require Strong Social Security Benefits: Views on Social Security Among African Americans, Hispanic Americans, and White Americans with Melissa Maitan Shepard, published by the National Academy of Social Insurance as part of a polling study commissioned to mark the program's 75th anniversary. The brief found that support for strengthening Social Security was strong across all racial groups, with 91 percent of African Americans and Hispanic Americans compared to 77 percent of whites agreeing that society has an obligation to provide a secure retirement for all workers.
In 2015, she contributed to The New York Times Room for Debate series, arguing that concerns about the long-term sustainability of Medicare and Medicaid were overstated and that the programs' futures would be determined by fiscal policy choices rather than structural flaws.
Public health work Rockeymoore Cummings has been a member of the National Academy of Social Insurance from 2003 to 2019, serving on its board of directors from 2014 to 2019 an organization that convenes leading experts on social insurance policy across health, income security, and disability. In 2006 she served on NASI's Study Panel on Medicare and Disparities, which produced the seminal report Strengthening Medicare's Role in Reducing Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, edited by Bruce C. Vladeck, Paul N. Van de Water, and June Eichner. The panel concluded that Medicare was obligated to take the lead in reducing racial and ethnic health disparities throughout the health system and issued 17 policy recommendations across five areas, including making the reduction of disparities a top administrative priority. The report was funded primarily by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.