vreeland@trueschool.org

Amy’s experiences have been grounded in social entrepreneurship, including developing programs to cultivate the leadership skills of first-generation college students at a nonprofit start-up in Boulder, Colorado; working as a founding high school math teacher in the unprecedented charter school movement in New Orleans; and advising community leaders in the design of human-centered social enterprises in rural South Africa. Realizing the potential of applying a grassroots design approach to education and recognizing the opportunity for educator-led innovation in the field, Amy left graduate school at Princeton University and founded TrueSchool Studio in 2013. Since then, TrueSchool Studio has supported over 1,100 educators impacting over 50,000 students across the United States.

TrueSchool has also collaborated with Microsoft, Stanford University, and Teach for America on the design of education technology products and national education initiatives. As a teacher, Amy built an entire Algebra 1 curriculum that focused on project-based learning. She open-sourced her curriculum, including lessons plans, materials, and assessments on her classroom website, which is still widely used by Algebra teachers today. In addition to her domestic education experience, Amy received the Benjamin Brown Award and spent ten months researching and writing about an education-focused development initiative in Ecuador, Argentina, and Brazil.