Wendy Kopp

CEO & Co-founder, Teach For All

Wendy Kopp is CEO and Co-founder of Teach For All, a global network of independent organizations that are developing collective leadership to ensure all children have the opportunity to fulfill their potential.

Prior to launching Teach For All in 2007, Wendy founded Teach For America in 1989 to marshal the energy of her generation against educational inequity in the United States. She led the organization, which has proven to be an unparalleled source of long-term leadership for expanding opportunity for children in the United States, for 24 years. Wendy led the development of Teach For All to be responsive to the initiative of social entrepreneurs around the world who were determined to adapt this approach in their own countries.

Wendy is the author of A Chance to Make History: What Works and What Doesn’t in Providing an Excellent Education for All (2011) and One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way (2000). She holds honorary doctorate degrees from University of Oklahoma (2014), Boston University (2013), Dartmouth College (2012), Harvard University (2012), Marquette University (2010), Washington University in St. Louis (2009), Georgetown University (2008), Mount Holyoke College (2007), Rhodes College (2007), Pace University (2004), Mercy College (2004), Smith College (2001), Princeton University (2000), Connecticut College (1995), and Drew University (1995).

She is the youngest person and the first woman to receive Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson Award (1993), the highest honor the school confers on its undergraduate alumni. In 1994 Time Magazine recognized her as one of the forty most promising leaders under 40; in 2006, U.S. News & World Report named her as one of America’s Best Leaders; and in 2008, Time Magazine recognized her as one of the World’s 100 Most Influential People. Wendy was the recipient of the Forbes 400 Lifetime Achievement Award for Social Entrepreneurship (2014); she has also been recognized with the Presidential Citizens Medal (2008), the Spelman College National Community Service Award (2011), the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship (2008), The Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Education Award (2006), the John F. Kennedy New Frontier Award (2004), the Clinton Center Award for Leadership and National Service (2003), the Schwab Foundation’s Outstanding Social Entrepreneur Award (2003), Aetna’s Voice of Conscience Award (1994), the Citizen Activist Award from the Gleitsman Foundation (1994), and the Jefferson Award for Public Service (1991).

Wendy holds a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University, where she participated in the undergraduate program of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

She resides in New York City with her husband Richard Barth and their four children.

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