Purpose, People and Promise: Cultivating Engagement & Optimism Through Entrepreneurship

Sandra Nagy has dedicated her career to driving innovation and building effective organizational strategy. Sandra began her career at Accenture as a Change Management consultant where she supported public and private sector clients through large-scale strategy and business transformation. Two of her years at Accenture were exclusively focused in the Government practice.

Sandra spent over a decade as a senior digital strategist at Pearson Education where she led multiple teams that worked across K-20 to transform curriculum and professional development resources with the use of technology. She was a member of a global team of educational technology champions focused on collaborating to solve problems in education. She engaged with stakeholders globally and was responsible for nurturing strategic partnerships with key customers and other like-minded organizations.

Prior to Pearson, Sandra worked at The Learning Partnership, a non-profit organization responsible for building stakeholder partnerships to support, promote and advance publicly funded education in Canada. She led a government and business-funded research project to look at blended, online and face-to-face, professional development for teachers in STEM courses. Sandra engaged in speaking opportunities across Canada sharing best practices in sustained, action-research driven professional development that leads to authentic community building.

With over 20 years of experience, Sandra has designed, developed and delivered hundreds of learning opportunities to thousands of employees and educators. She is a firm believer in the capacity of educators to drive future-skill development, and in sustained professional development that leverages a blend of learning tools. Sandra leads the Education Practice at Future Design School building strong academic partnerships with school leaders that help to drive their strategic priorities through consulting support, professional development and efficacious curriculum resources.

Sandra’s educational background includes a Master's in Education from Harvard University focused on Technology in Education. While completing this degree she worked at TechBoston, an organization infusing technology programs into inner-city Boston schools; conducted published research into distance learning at the Concord Consortium; and volunteered through the MIT Media Lab teaching robotics to home-schooled students. Sandra also holds a Bachelor of Commerce focused on Organizational Behavior and Entrepreneurship from McGill University. During her time in Montreal she actively volunteered at the Montreal Neurological Hospital focusing on brain research, taught within the Faculty of Management, and led tours on campus to prospective students.

Sarah Prevette has developed transformational strategy for some of the country’s biggest business leaders and renowned brands. Globally recognized for her work in human-centered design and entrepreneurship, she is proud to work alongside an incredible team of educators to drive innovation inside schools. Prevette’s organization, Future Design School, provides world-class strategy development, professional training programs and resources that empower effective leadership and personalized learning.

Schools across North America leverage Future Design School in order to build capacity with their existing teams and to drive critical skill development with their students. The organization works with school leaders to establish holistic, long term strategic plans that have immediate, measurable impact. Through a wide range of services that include world-class professional development and comprehensive curriculum; the Future Design School team actively supports educators in designing exceptional, experiential learning for students. The company proudly supports over 20,000 educators and more than 350,000 students.

Sarah has an illustrious history of innovation. After starting her career at an early stage startup in 1997, she gained invaluable experience in all aspects of business as she worked with an entrepreneurial team to scale the company into a global behemoth. She was recruited to run product development and marketing for a large software company, which she helped grow and sell to Thomson Reuters in 2008. Prevette then founded Sprouter; the world’s first online community providing real-time advice to startups. The platform was acquired in 2011 and she went on to build BetaKit – a popular technology news site that was acquired in 2013. In 2014, she joined forces with talented business leaders from some of the world’s top companies like LEGO, Virgin and Starbucks to create a venture capital fund that actively invested millions of dollars in early-stage startups across a wide variety of industries and created nearly a billion dollars in net worth.

Sarah has been named by Inc Magazine as one of the top entrepreneurs in North America and one of the “Top 20 Power Elite” by Canadian Business. She is frequently in the media and has been profiled by numerous prestigious publications including The Globe and Mail, Entrepreneur Magazine and The Wall Street Journal. She is an in-demand speaker who has delivered keynote speeches at prestigious events including South by Southwest, Big Omaha, GrowCo, Summit Series and Google Forward and has lectured at many academic institutions including Harvard, Columbia and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is an active advisor and investor in several companies, as well as an esteemed board member for Communitech and VentureLAB. Sarah proudly serves as an Innovation Advisor to the Governor General and continues to advocate for startups in her ongoing advisory work with various levels of government.