I'm a writer, educator, and social entrepreneur living and working in Oakland, CA. I direct the largest California site of Citizen Schools, a non-profit that connects low-income public middle school students to opportunities for apprenticeships, college and career connections, and academic coaching. My hundreds of students get to study web design at the Google office, learn the science of baking from pastry chefs, and program robots with engineers from Sandia labs. Our org has won a Skoll foundation award for Social Innovation, and we're always looking for ways to connect youth to the opportunities that are all around them in the form of caring professionals who are willing to volunteer their time. It's pretty great to see kids connect the dots between "robots are awesome" > "I want to be an engineer" > "I need to go to college" > "I should probably pay more attention in 7th grade math!"

Before I moved to California, I was an 8th grade teacher in Brownsville, Brooklyn for four years. I hold an MA in Education Policy, Organization, and Leadership from the Stanford University School of Eduction, where I also got to work on some cool design projects at the Stanford d.school. I helped develop a teacher data dashboard for San Francisco Unified School District, and I worked on a project with Nokia and the University of Nairobi to use mobile phones to connect malaria patients to information about pharmacy stockouts.

I'm interested in urban youth getting ahead, leveraging technology to help level the playing field, and applying the design thinking process to sticky social problems.

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