Wendy Kopp
By Mary Frias
Teach For America
Wendy Kopp first spoke of her idea for Teach For America in her Princeton University undergraduate thesis in 1989. By 1990, a charter corps of 500 committed recent college graduates joined Teach For America. Their goal was to help eliminate educational inequity. Now almost 33,000 participants have reached more than 3 million children nationwide. She is now the CEO and Co-Founder of Teach for All, a global network of independent nonprofit organizations that apply the same model as Teach for America in other countries.