Paige Ponder
Paige is a nonprofit leader experienced in designing and scaling impactful programs and organizations and building lasting partnerships based on trust and shared goals. She is Founder and CEO of Idea Jar, LLC, a consulting firm focused on helping innovators in the education and social impact spaces bring their ideas to life and scale them to achieve sustainable impact.
As CEO of One Million Degrees from 2012-2021, Paige developed and scaled a fledgling nonprofit organization with an innovative model to accelerate low-income community college students’ progress on career pathways to economic mobility. She led the organization through a period of dramatic growth and launched a rigorous evaluation to measure its impact.
Prior to entering higher education, Paige designed and led initiatives at Chicago Public Schools to systematically drive up the number of freshmen on track to graduate by developing early warning indicators and disseminating promising practices for high schools to better support freshmen during this “make or break” year. The Freshmen On-Track movement at CPS has resulted in a graduation rate of 85% in 2024 compared to 53% in 2007 and has recently been highlighted in two books: Dan Heath’s 2020 book on solving problems at scale, Upstream, and Emily Krone Phillips’ The Make-or-Break Year.