Biography
Ian has had a rich and varied career that has seen him as the Deputy Director of Postsecondary Success at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, where he was part of the team that gave away nearly $470 million to increase college completion rates among low income young adults.
He worked at MTV as the Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships & Public Affairs. There he won two Emmys, while developing global and domestic campaigns, such as “Get Schooled,” which used the power of media and popular culture to motivate young people to graduate from high school and go to and succeed in college, and “Choose or Lose,” which helped mobilise more than 20 million young people to vote in the 2004 and 2008 Presidential elections.
Prior to working at MTV, Ian worked as the Director of Strategy and Performance Measurement at The White House USA Freedom Corps office which formed after September 11th to encourage every American to make a lifetime commitment in service of others.
For the last decade, Ian was the CEO of Public Prep (2010-2020), the nation’s first and oldest non-profit network that exclusively develops exceptional, tuition-free PreK and single-sex elementary and middle public schools. Public Prep’s unique approach places equal emphasis on character development, college knowledge, and academic excellence through an integrated curriculum to ensure all of its scholars are on a path to College Completion and beyond.
He is also the author of Agency (Templeton Press), a forthcoming 2021 book on how to inspire young people of all races to build strong families and become masters of their own destiny, despite life’s challenges.
He is a 2 x Emmy Award Winner and the 2019 recipient of the Harvard Business School Bert King Service Award.
Ian has been published in the Wall Street Journal – The Power of Personal Agency. Read more about Ian in Black Enterprise, Fast Company and Echoing Green and a Harvard Business School profile. A sampling of Ian’s coverage includes the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the New York Post.