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Spotlight on Alexandra Bernadotte

With over 12 years in executive management and strategic development in both the non-profit and private sector, Alex's experience includes Executive Director of the Princeton Review's Silicon Valley office, Vice President of Marketing and Internet Strategy at Explorica, Inc., and Operations Manager for the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. Alex served as the Vice President of Business Development and Interim Executive Director for Foundation for a College Education (FCE), a non-profit organization whose mission is to increase the number of underrepresented students who enroll in and graduate from college and has recently been elected as President of the FCE Board of Directors. 

For me, going back to school was about getting the education reform theory. I wanted to marry my practitioner's experience with a historical grounding. My most recent focus had been on one student/family/community at a time, and I really wanted to take on the system. The fellowship gave me a bird's eye view of what the entire landscape looks like.

Prior to the fellowship, I was working with people who were philosophically very aligned with me. In some ways that's great, it's very reaffirming to be in a community of people who think exactly the way that you do. On the other hand, Education Pioneers forced me to interact with people who were just as interested in education reform but looked at things in a completely different way. The fellowship made me realize that my ideas were very rooted in my experience and that there were other very valid ways of looking at systemic change. This notion of 'the cause' doesn't actually exist because the issues are so complex and there are a vast range of approaches on how to tackle each issue.

Ultimately, the fellowship crystallized my voice about the issues and allowed me to be more open-minded in embracing multiple ways to solve these problems.

My project at NewSchools was to capture key insights about how they were involved with organizations they were funding. NewSchools takes a seat on the board of their ventures and they wanted to know if this gave them the impact they wanted. I had just been elected the chair of the FCE Board of Directors so I had extensive board experience and was grappling with the same issue; the project was totally aligned with what I could bring to the table. I interviewed over 25 CEOs and board members of organizations in NewSchools' portfolio in the process of developing a synthesis document to guide the organization's future board involvement. After graduation, I was brought on at NewSchools to do investment analysis of the ventures they fund - identifying entrepreneurs and thinking through their strategies and challenges.

The bigger part, though, is connecting organizations to each other to improve their impact and move the system along, collectively, by sharing knowledge and establishing best practices.

The most awesome part of my job, the one that ties it all together for me, is devising strategies to not only help kids access and enter college but also to graduate. We've done a lot in education to increase the number of kids going into college but how can we encourage organizations to measure their success by how many students are graduating from college' That's the part that I'm most passionate about and I've feel like I've been able to change at least this organization about how we think about college success.