Ashley L.

Ashley has dreamed her whole life of building new education pathways that enable smart, kind, and thoughtful young people to achieve their dreams, if in a non-traditional manner. Her organization, Atlas Fellowship, enables their grantees to make breakthrough contributions to large-scale problems by providing them with online and in-person communities of other changemakers, scholarships for education-related expenses, and access to funding for their social ventures.

Prior to building Atlas Fellowship, she founded and led a nonprofit that democratized access to study abroad through online cultural exchange programs, taught entrepreneurship classes to high school students, and led one of the world's largest startup pitch competitions for young people. She deeply believes that learning experiences that connect young people with the world (study abroad, design thinking, work-based learning, etc.) are key to activating changemakers. She is dedicated to making experiences more accessible that help students notice problems in the world around them, empathize with others, tinker with solutions, and iterate on their ideas through feedback.