Stacey Childress

Stacey Childress is the former CEO of NewSchools Venture Fund and the Advanced Education Research and Development Fund (AERDF). A nationally recognized expert on innovation, education, and philanthropy, she joined NewSchools in 2014 and refocused it on the future of learning. During her tenure at NewSchools, Stacey worked with a diverse team of leaders and investors to incubate AERDF, an Inclusive R&D fund, which launched in 2021.

In 2021, Stacey was named to the Forbes 50 over 50: Impact list, a group of trailblazing women changing their communities and the world through social entrepreneurship, law, advocacy and education.

From 2010 through 2014, Stacey led the Next Generation Learning team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, investing in technologies that enable better learning outcomes for students. In 2012 she was named to the Forbes Impact 15 list, a group of innovators reimagining learning globally.

Earlier in her career, Stacey was on the faculty of the Harvard Business School. There she studied entrepreneurial activity in public education, writing three books and more than 30 cases and articles about education entrepreneurship. She also developed and taught a course on education entrepreneurship that was taken by more than 800 students and won teaching awards from the school’s Dean and her students.

Before joining Harvard, Stacey co-founded an enterprise software company, spent 10 years in corporate sales and leadership at a Fortune 500 company, and worked as a classroom teacher.

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