Stacey Childress

Stacey Childress

CEO, NewSchools Venture Fund
Stacey Childress
Stacey Childress leads NewSchools Venture Fund, a national venture philanthropy. NewSchools finds, funds, and supports teams of educators and entrepreneurs who are reimagining education, so all young people graduate high school prepared and inspired to achieve their most ambitious dreams and plans. Since its founding in 1998, NewSchools has invested in nearly 300 education entrepreneurs. Among their many accomplishments, these entrepreneurs started 470 schools with capacity to serve more than 200,000 students around the country and created education technologies reaching more than 60 million students and teachers worldwide. Prior to NewSchools, Childress led the Next Generation Learning team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, investing in schools and technologies that support personalized learning for students. In 2012, she was named to the Forbes Impact 15, a group of innovators revolutionizing education world-wide. After 12 years in the private sector in start-ups and a Fortune 500 company, Childress joined the faculty of the Harvard Business School where she wrote and taught about entrepreneurial activity in public education. During her time at Harvard she wrote three books, and 40 cases and articles. She also won teaching awards from her students and the HBS dean for her course on education entrepreneurship, which was taken by nearly 1,000 students between 2005 and 2010.