Before founding the organization Jared was an Engagement Manager at McKinsey & Co. and a Director at TEDxCambridge. He holds a B.S. in Finance from NYU Stern, where he first began working with education organizations on a pro-bono basis. When he isn't evangelizing for our cause, he's usually writing code or cooking up something tasty.
In the five plus years since I was first enamored with the idea of creating an online community where youth could get career advice, a shockingly large number of people have contributed time, money, skills, their networks, and their moral support to help us get where we are. It is shocking to me to acknowledge not only how many people have been willing to help make CareerVillage.org exist, but also how many people are needed to make CareerVillage.org exist. It is an enormous effort put in by an enormous number of amazing people, each doing a part. It's with that sacrifice in mind, that I want to thank each and every one of them.
- Jared, Founder
Ajay Kapoor is an advisor who has helped us build our brand strategy, figure out how to collaborate with large companies, and hire staff. He has founded startups, worked for several years as an executive at Procter and Gamble, and now does digital strategy at SharkNinja.
Akhil Sanka was a 2016 summer intern before his sophomore year at Homestead High School. Akhil implemented a major redesign of the out-of-the-app pages on our site incuding the splash page, the about page, explanation pages for all user types, our privacy policy and TOS, and more.
Akshat Pradhan contributed great ideas and encouragement, and did early product testing back in 2011 and 2012 when CareerVillage.org was first getting started.
Alexandra Beall advised CareerVillage on product design and strategy during Summer 2020. Alexandra shared her time and expertise to enhance the home page, question detail page, and To Do List feature, in addition to helping us ideate on a future rapid response career text line.
Alexis Perez was a software engineering intern in 2021 who added demographic questions into the student and professional onboarding so we could assess the extent to which we are matching both sides of the community.
Alex Nguyen was an intern in 2023 who contributed to various pieces of work across the platform, including: the "For Students" page, numerous user email related projects, and setting us up for Pros to be able to add their industry in SOC codes.
Alex Puhl was an Atlassian product manager who volunteered in 2021 to advise CareerVillage's product manager and executive director to improve our product management processes and frameworks.
Amanda Cheung was a front-end engineer who improved the accessibility of our front-end interface for users with screen readers, improved the quality and maintainability of our front-end code, and taught others on our team how to write maintainable front-end code.
Amanda Vigil included CareerVillage in education-to-employment community events in San Francisco and was part of the team that introduced CareerVillage to SFUSD. She continues to advocate for youth voices at KQED.
Andy Wang, programmer at Zynga. Steadfast volunteer, provided feedback, suggestions, and lots of encouragement to our team.
Anina Hitt was a rockstar intern who worked with us multiple times over several years. She did a tremendous amount of the hands-on work to make sure that the quality of advice and backend process management was handled well. She also worked on product management for a while, and has always been a great source of product feedback. She is forever a member of our team.
Ansa Schmulbach was a software engineering intern who built impact reporting tools for our staff that reduced report generation time from 2 days to 2 hours.
Aston Motes helped us set up internal data tools that became mission-critical infrastructure, and funded some of our core programming.
AT&T Aspire Accelerator (Anne Wintroub, helped spread the word about our community and helped us meet funders who funded much of the core infrastructure for CareerVillage for 2015-2020, helped us find supporters, contractors, and employees, and helped us learn how to navigate K12 conferences and find research data on K12 district partners.
Ayesha Khanna is the president of the Points of Light Civic Incubator, which ran the first accelerator program CareerVillage.org ever participated in. Ayesha has been a steadfast advisor, spending hours on the phone with our team providing guidance on everything from legal structure to growth strategy to how to collaborate with large Fortune 500 companies.
Ben Eisenpress volunteered to think through some of the strategic implications of doing multi-sectoral city-level partnerships.
Ben Hitov volunteered to spend some of his 2011 holiday vacation helping to build the very first version of the CareerVillage.org platform. He split the user model into a Student and a Professional model for the first time.
Ben Landis interned with us and worked on community management and marketing tasks. He contributed to a lot of the promotional content that helped spread awareness of the community.
Blaise Freeman was a front-end engineer who implemented an early site-wide redesign to CareerVillage v2, reorganized our front-end templates, and taught us how to improve the organization of our front-end code over time.
Britney Herman was a 2013 summer intern working on social media marketing and community operations.
Bryant Gomer was a partnerships and education manager at CareerVillage.org for 3 years. He joined very early and was steadfast through many major strategic changes in how we partnered with organizations that could help us serve more students. He was there during the launch of to do lists, pivoting our educator service model, the creation of our community guidelines, our rebranding, and more. One of the areas where Bryant truly stands out the most is in the purity of his understanding of our mission. He has always kept the interests of the most disadvantaged students top of mind. He has been an advocate for low-income youth and for underrepresented youth and his ethical and moral clarity has always been incredibly valuable.
Bry Breckenridge helped spread the word about CareerVillage.org to CSR leaders, and advocated for the inclusion of CareerVillage.org in the programming of at least two companies that he has been a CSR leader of.
Cameron White was our PO at NewSchools Venture Fund, and provided us with funding for the first version of our educator platform: "CareerVillage in Class"
Cameryn Mitchell provided us with important advice about how to engage effectively with workforce boards, and championed CareerVillage's partnership with the City of Rock Hill, SC.
Carlos Vizcardo is a digital ads strategist and led CareerVillage’s Google Grant and LinkedIn Ads strategy in 2023, making it easier for people to find CareerVillage while searching or browsing online.
Chris Crawford and Paul Mooney, Kaggle Competition Managers. Executed the Kaggle Data Science for Good competition in 2019 to improve how we match questions to volunteers at CareerVillage.org.
Christina Ding was a software engineering intern in 2021 who created the backend framework for a social post format that we may launch on CareerVillage in the future.
Corina Chen was an intern in 2021 on the Community Team. She supported Students and Pros, managed our social media presence, wrote articles, helped streamline our support desk macros, and more.
Damian Ferencz was an engineer who re-built our SSO integration for Okta partners and made it possible for large university campuses to use Okta to provide CareerVillage campus-wide.
David Guerrero was a community intern who helped us build lists of potential partners, and moderated the content on the site.
David Ohta was an intern with us for several years, working mostly on strategy projects. His writing is great, his problem solving skills were really useful when thinking about questions like 'Should we open local city chapters?', and he has always been a steadfast and reliable team member to us.
Debashri Mukherjee was a data science intern who built several major internal dashboards that have helped our small staff keep up to date on how well we're serving students, and used the data in our website's db to answer a big laundry list of questions we had about user experience and satisfaction. She also pressure tested the first version of the hashtag recommendation system.
Eduardo Veiga was an engineer building search functionality, improving user experience, and findign and fixing bugs in our core app.
Erik Wernevi worked with Ben Eisenpress on the multi-sector city-level partnerships pro bono strategy project, with great results.
Erin Felter was one of the first CSR managers to recruit corporate partner employees as volunteers at CareerVillage.org. She started off staffing the "volunteer here" booth at Zynga, and took CareerVillage with her when she went to lead Okta's CSR efforts.
Ethan Chen was a CareerVillage intern during Spring 2023 through a partnership with NYC Public Schools. Ethan contributed to several projects for the CareerVillage.org partnerships team that have enabled us to reach out to more potential partners.
Full Circle Fund (Jay Hirschton, Dan Ste helped us meet new board members, engaged some pro bono volunteers who helped us with marketing, provided us with essential funding, and helped spread the word about our community.
Gabriela Golmar was a full-stack engineer on the CareerVillage team for two years. She had a huge influence on almost every part of the platform, including the main Q&A, the To Do Lists, Moderation, Jenkins, our Test suite, our AWS infrastructure, and more. She built the in-app translation feature. She was also the primary PR reviewer and managed all merges and deployments.
Gerald Chertavian , the founder of YearUp, advised our Executive Director at several critical junctures on sustainability, business models, partnership development strategy, and effective advocacy.
Gillian Shelley was a development intern for the summer after her sophomore year at McGill. She researched institutional funders who would grant us money to continue our work.
Grant Deken advised our digital marketing initiatives and provided encouragement and funding at an early stage.
Heejae Lim helped us learn about funding opportunities, compared notes with us on managing technology nonprofit operations, and encouraged us to continue in the face of obstacles.
Heidi Kramer provided advice to our staff in 2013 about how to best engage with employee engagement professionals at large employers. She has championed the use of CareerVillage.org in P-TECH school settings, and been a passionate advocate for the importance of access to career advice.
Henry Yang is a software developer at Amazon who volunteered to help us build out some of the AI/ML pipeline systems we need to deliver better recommendations to volunteers.
Ian Dickens was a designer with Make & Model who designed many of the important illustrations on the site, including all of the student avatars.
Ian Kigen was an engineer on the team that created much of the educator dashboard, maintained basic site functionality, and made the website faster.
Jaleel Mackey was employee #2 at CareerVillage and a core team member in 2015 and 2016. While at CareerVillage Jaleel did a little bit of everything, including supporting educators, increasing growth, and digital marketing. Jaleel is a USC grad who cares deeply about supporting underprivileged and underrepresented youth. He is great.
Jason Wang recommended places we could promote open positions to formerly incarcerated individuals returning to the workforce.
Jay Cranman was a Civic Accelerator leader who helped coach us through some of our earliest strategic decisions, and helped us expand our volunteer base in Atlanta after he moved to HandsOn Atlanta. He's been a huge source of inspiration and encouragement for many years.
Jeff Atwood was one of our very first advisors, helping us think through the feature set we needed (and did not need) and how to provide maximum value to our community. Jeff is a co-founder of Stack Overflow, author of the blog Coding Horror, and currently the founder of Discourse.
Jeff Livingston, EdTech Advisor. Gave advice and guidance on how to best support teachers and districts.
Jennifer Pan is one of the co-founders of CareerVillage.org and has been a behind-the-scenes counselor to Jared on nearly all major decisions made. Jen and Jared are a husband wife team who decided to found CareerVillage.org together because they shared a dream and wanted to dedicate part of their family's life to social impact. Jen is a professor at Stanford University, but was a grad student at Harvard when CareerVillage.org was founded.
Jennifer Sun was a volunteer who joined our team almost right after it was founded. Jennifer assisted in a ton of early-stage tasks including product and user testing. She also recruited and led a 10-person product development Advisory Board.
Jerry Won highlighted the CareerVillage story on the podcast Dear Asian Americans, and provided advice and introductions related to higher education career services.
Jesse Pujji taught us how to use Waypoints as an alternative management practice to OKRs or Lean, which we’ve used in the past.
Jessica Garcia-Kohl introduced us to nonprofit organizations in the San Jose / San Francisco Bay Area that are working on the same issues.
Joe Waters coached the staff on how to engage corporate partners in sponsorships and cause marketing and how to build an online community of people who are excited to support CareerVillage's mission.
Jordan Rivera was a Community Manager at CareerVillage.org who was instrumental in setting up most of the large-scale community operations. His passion for helping people, his commeraderie, his dedication to our team, and his excellent judgment and lucid thinking helped push our community through many phases of growth and maturation.
Joyce Oshita showed us how to test the accessibility of the CareerVillage user experience using a screen reader and coached us through how to get started improving accessibility.
Juan Abbona was a front-end engineer who improved the maintainability of our front-end code, dramatically improved front-end performance, and improved the quality of our developer tools.
Julia Freeland Fisher shared extensive research with us relating to the importance and nature of effective student networks, and introduced us to nonprofits and foundations who are working on the same issues.
Julie Wanja was an engineer on the team that created much of the educator dashboard, maintained basic site functionality, and made the website faster.
Karmalita Contee, PhD, was a CSR manager who helped us establish our corporate volunteering model. She was an exceptionally effective volunteer community organizer and is directly responsible for thousands of industry professionals signing up as volunteers. She's bold, candid, pragmatic, and visionary.
Kat Toomey was among the first workforce board professionals to see the potential of CareerVillage. After creating her own DIY CareerVillage program for educators in Berkshire County, MA she helped us co-design our workforce board partnership model and continues to partner with us today.
Kelly LaBuff was a staff member and product manager who helped us build many core features on the site, including the career path features, and presided over the rebranding of CareerVillage.org from the old tree look into the new dual-tone iconic look we sport today. Kelly is a Stanford alum who is now doing mechanical engineering for an AgTech startup.
Kenneth Williams was an advisor who helped us build some very important strategies related to partnering with companies. Kenny worked at Deloitte for several years, including in their Social Impact practice and was a Phi Beta Kappa + Summa Cum Laude grad from Morehouse who put himself through college on scholarships.
Kevin Barenblat is President of FastForward, a tech nonprofit accelerator. Kevin has helped CareerVillage.org make important strategic decisions, advised on hiring, team building, and fundraising strategy. He's advocated for the importance of tech nonprofits for years.
Kira Huismann invested 3 months in improving the use of our AdGrants account to expand awareness of CareerVillage as part of the Google Online Marketing Challenge
Leah Inoyatov was a partnerships intern that played a key role in getting our marketing and advertising function up and running, helped articulate our impact, and carried out useful research.
Lea Poquerusse recruited volunteers, donated early, and provided a steady stream of encouragement to the early staff.
Lena Mödinger invested 3 months in improving the use of our AdGrants account to expand awareness of CareerVillage as part of the Google Online Marketing Challenge
Li Liang coached us through how to improve our internal data science and data analysis processes and how to recruit and interview candidates for an internal data role for the first time.
Lina Levin invested 3 months in improving the use of our AdGrants account to expand awareness of CareerVillage as part of the Google Online Marketing Challenge
Lindsey Manning was employee #1 at CareerVillage.org. She joined when we had just 3,658 registered users and 1,453 questions. When she left we had over 50,000 users and over 100k content nodes. It is hard to overstate how much of our work was influenced by her ideas, her passion for the mission, and her energy. She served as a partnerships manager, a product manager, and a community director, and had a hand in most of the core strategic decisions we made during the many years she was on the team. We're thankful for her bravery in joining such an early movement, her energy, her passion for her work, and the many many things she has done for the students and the professionals in the community.
Lizeth Galindo Roman was an intern on our community team, hustling up answers to unanswered questions and making sure that advice quality got better every day.
Long Nguyen was an engineering intern who worked on many of the public-facing pages, including a major version update on this page you are looking at right now!
Lucas Farias was a Front End Engineer on the CareerVillage team and helped develop a ton of features and improvements to the platform that have been used by millions of CareerVillage community members.
Manh Dao was an intern in 2023 who established atomic components and developed a library to help streamline and unify our front end development process.
Marcus Strother is the President & CEO of MENTOR California. Marcus has helped connect us with impactful like-minded organizations and we are partnering with him to support MENTOR California’s mentees.
Marina Watson was a student experience intern before for the summer before her senior year at Harvard.
Martin Prunell was a senior engineering leader who helped architect our application for many years, built and modernized our cloud infrastructure, and recruited and managed the bulk of our engineering team through his role as a principal at Sophilabs.
Matthew Bellows, CEO of Yesware. Major donation when we were early, ran the Boston Marathon to our benefit, and provided us with free access to yesware for our entire team.
Megan Dunn was a Community Team intern from 2018-2020 focused on building social media content deserving of an audience.
Meg Ansara was an advisor who helped us think about how to apply large-scale grassroots organizing to our model. Meg was a regional director at Obama for America and then became a partner with 270 Strategies.
Meg Garlinghouse , Leader of LinkedIn for Good. Meg helped us access LinkedIn's volunteer marketplace, which has attracted tens of thousands of volunteers to CareerVillage.org
Michelle Brown coached us through our first Department of Education grant application based on her experience as the Founder of CommonLit.
Miguel Quiroga , former CEO of Visible, enabled an accelerator we participated in, became a personal volunteer, a donor, and a leadership advisor.
Mike Utaegbulam developed digital marketing campaigns to help improve awareness of CareerVillage among young people of color in the United States.
Mikia Manley was a 2013 summer intern before her senior year at Harvard. She worked on strategy, operations,and fundraising.
Neel Kishnani was a software engineering intern who updated front-end interfaces, refactored partner pages, and created reporting tools for staff.
Nicole Dunn is the VP of Marketing and Programs at FFWD and has provided very impactful coaching to our staff about communications, PR, and more.
Olga Gabris was an Atlassian product manager who volunteered in 2021 to advise CareerVillage's product manager and executive director to improve our product management processes and frameworks.
Oliver Hurst-Hiller , CTO and Head of Product at DonorsChoose.org, provided advice several times about how to staff our product teams, balancing certain technical trade-offs, and helped us refine our financial model and flywheel.
Omar Wasow was an advisor during our 2-4th years, especially when we were thinking about educators as our primary channelt or each students. Omar is a Professor at Princeton, one of the co-founders of BlackPlanet.com, an early technology pundit in the dot com era, and is a co-founder of a K-8 charter school in Brooklyn.
Oren Falkowitz was a supporter from the very start. Oren made calls for us, asked his friends and family to donate, made donations himself, and helped us think through product changes. For almost a year his company Area1 donated office space inside their building in Redwood City, and Oren provided advice on IT security. Oren is the founder of several data and security startups including Area1, and formerly worked at the NSA.
Paul East, Vice President of Engineering at Area One Security. Paul advised us on setting up the initial framework for our shift to machine learning in matching students to mentors. He provided invaluable insight and expertise in setting up our architecture.
Paul Rosania was an early supporter, advisor, and donor. As a product management veteran, Paul coached our staff through several product strategy sessions.
Pradeep Mangalath coached us through how to recruit and interview candidates for an internal data role for the first time.
Priscilla Bonilla was a 2021 summer intern who worked on several graphic design and user interface designs with our staff.
Raj Parekh was a very early donor and once lent us his home for a team offsite strategy meeting!
Rey Faustino runs a peer tech nonprofit called OneDegree, and has often provided helpful insights when comparing notes on org charts, operating models, and other strategies.
Rob Mancabelli gave advice about how to work with educators and made personal donations to help us get off the ground. Rob is an author of Personal Learning Networks and is now the CEO of BrightBytes.
Rob Shavell was an early donor and supporter, starting from when CareerVillage.org was a small project in Boston, and continuing as it grew nationally and internationally. Among other things, Rob advocated for setting a very high bar for both Student and Professional satisfaction and service quality.
Rohun Saxena was a 2016 summer intern before his sophomore year at Stanford. He rebuilt a major piece of the recommendation engine that emails questions to volunteers.
Ryan Le was an engineering intern who built some front-end sites and data tools.
Sarah Paiji, CEO of Snapette. Donated, answered questions of students from the beginning, helped us raise funding at the beginning, and recorded a video asking for support for the village.
Savio Abuga was an engineer on the team that created much of the educator dashboard, maintained basic site functionality, and made the website faster.
Sebastian Nogara was an engineer working on our core dev team, finding and fixing bugs and building several new features.
Shailah Stewart helped the CareerVillage staff understand how to effectively design a workforce board partnership model, and introduced CareerVillage to many educational institutions, nonprofits, and workforce boards.
Shannon Farley is Executive Director of FastForward, a tech nonprofit accelerator. Shannon helped the CareerVillage.org staff improve its pitch, meet funders, improve its strategies, communicate the importance of scalable operations, and build its own capacity. She is a champion for the tech nonprofit sector and a powerful advocate for CareerVillage.org.
Steven Trevathan was a designer and product manager who led the site-wide redesign of CareerVillage, added several new core user features, led the improvement of our user experience, and implemented the new educator dashboard. His mark on the look and feel of the CareerVillage experience cannot be overstated.
Summer Kennedy met with our staff to coach us through how to create exciting remote events for groups of community members.
Suzanne Reisman served as a board member for several years during our early years. She is a veteran of the nonprofit sector, including several years spent as a grantmaker. Suzanne instilled in us the importance of clearly articulating how we can effect an equity based mission with an equality based strategy. She has always ensured that we are on task for the mission we set ourselves on, and never straying from it.
Svenja Kußmaul invested 3 months in improving the use of our AdGrants account to expand awareness of CareerVillage as part of the Google Online Marketing Challenge
Trisha Micarsos was a 2016 summer intern while a student at UC Santa Barbara. She worked on social media and partnership support.
Varun Arora is an advisor who answered several important questions from us about how AI / ML could work at CareerVillage.
Viansa Schmulbach was a 2019 summer intern who automated some extremely time-consuming staff processes, and gathered and processed data to answer questions staff members needed to understand to improve the quality of CareerVillage.org services.
Yaw Agyenim-Boateng , McKinsey Partner, provided us with strategic advice on how to best support career development in sub-saharan Africa.
