AMY COLE VREELAND, Founder + Executive Director, amy@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 startup in Boulder, Colorado; working as a founding high school math teacher in the unprecedented charter school movement in New Orleans, Louisiana; and collaborating with community leaders on the design of locally-led, sustainable enterprises in rural South Africa.
Realizing the potential of applying a participatory design approach to education and recognizing the power of educator-led innovation to drive equity and excellence in schools, Amy left graduate school at Princeton University and founded TrueSchool in 2013. TrueSchool focuses on school to systems change. Over the course of their unique year-long program with school teams, TrueSchool galvanizes cultures of collective efficacy within schools (the strongest research-backed indicator of student achievement) and drives change across systems through powerful cohort-wide data and cases of transformational schools. 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 initiatives in Ecuador, Argentina, and Brazil. More recently, Amy spent 18 months working on school system design and public-private-partnerships in education in West Africa. She speaks Spanish and Portuguese.
Amy has participated in the 4.0 Schools Launch Program and the Propeller Social Venture Accelerator. She is an Unreasonable Fellow and Echoing Green Fellow. In 2015, she was honored as “one of the world’s best emerging social innovators.”