Advisory Board of Governors
Wendy Kopp
CEO and Founder, Teach for America
From her dorm room at Princeton University, Wendy Kopp created a plan for a new national corps called Teach For America that would build the movement to end educational inequity by enlisting her generation’s most promising future leaders – outstanding recent graduates of all academic majors and career interests – in teaching for two years in the nation's neediest urban and rural public schools. After graduating, Ms. Kopp made her plan a reality. Working with a group of other recent college graduates, she founded the corps in 1989. Since then, she has served as president of Teach For America, which currently fields 3,000 corps members and involves 7,500 alumni who exert continuing leadership in educational and social reform.
In her book, One Day, All Children: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For America and What I Learned Along the Way (Public Affairs, 2001), Ms. Kopp describes how she created and built Teach For America as well as her thoughts about what it will take to realize Teach For America’s vision that one day, all children in this nation will have the opportunity to attain an excellent education.
In 2003, Ms. Kopp was appointed to the President's Council on Service and Civic Participation and to the Advisory Board of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.
Ms. Kopp holds honorary doctorate degrees from Pace University (2004), Mercy College (2004), Smith College (2001), Princeton University (2000), Connecticut College (1995), and Drew University (1995). Kopp 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 December 1994, Time Magazine recognized her as one of the forty most promising leaders under 40. In addition, Ms. Kopp has received Child magazine’s Children’s Champion Award (2003), 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), the Jefferson Award for Public Service (1991), and the Kilby Young Innovator Award (1991).
Ms. Kopp 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 three sons, Benjamin, Francis, and Haddon.
The Partnership for Public Service is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that works to revitalize our federal government by inspiring a new generation to serve and by transforming the way government works.
