K-12 Sustainability Summit

Amanda Abrom

Amanda Abrom is the director of the Global Schools Program, an initiative of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which supports a community of 1,500+ primary and secondary schools. Under her leadership, Global Schools has received awards for its innovative teacher training and curriculum programs and scaled to more than 100 countries.

Amanda has worked at various levels of educational program design and implementation from the school to systems level. Before co-founding the Global Schools Program at SDSN, Amanda worked internationally as a teacher, with the US State Department on student-exchange programs (Middle Eastern Partnership Initiative and Study of the US Institutes for Women Leaders from Sub-Saharan Africa), and with the Chilean Ministry of Education and the British Council to promote English-language initiatives in rural Chile. At the graduate level, she had the opportunity to work at UNICEF’s Education Cannot Wait Fund, the UN SDG Fund, as well as the Columbia Earth Institute.

Amanda completed master’s degrees in public policy and international development at Columbia SIPA and the London School of Economics and is now a visiting professor at IESEG School of Management in Paris on the topics of AI and sustainability. Throughout her career, she has been named a: Fulbright Scholar (US Dept of State); WISE Emerging Leader in Education (Qatar Foundation); Aspen Future Climate Leader (Aspen Institute); Environmental Education 30 Under 30 (NAAEE); SDG4 Ambassador (UN Foundation); UNCTAD Youth Delegate (UNCTAD).

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Jason Swanson

Jason Swanson is the senior director of strategic foresight at KnowledgeWorks. An award-winning futurist, Jason develops forecasts, sensemaking guides, artifacts from the future, and immersive experiences. Jason is a frequent public speaker and workshop facilitator and holds a B.A. in public policy from West Chester University and an M.S. in foresight from the University of Houston. He is a fellow with the Royal Society of Arts and is a member of the Remake Learning Council.

Anna Russo

As the director of community futures at KnowledgeWorks, Anna brings experience in designing and facilitating transformational conversations for diverse groups in education, nonprofit, and business settings. Prior to KnowledgeWorks, she cultivated partnerships and served as senior regional membership manager with the American Association for Justice. In addition to serving as a school board member, Anna has an extensive education background as a teacher and administrator in Memphis, Tennessee. In her current role, she works with schools, districts, state departments of education, educational partners, members of the business community, and other community members to imagine their shared vision for the future of learning and design strategies to achieve their desired futures.

Anna holds a bachelor’s degree in government and women’s and gender studies from the University of Texas at Austin and a master’s degree in education from Christian Brothers University. She also holds a master’s degree in organizational dynamics from the University of Pennsylvania, where her studies focused on group and team dynamics, systems and design thinking, and participatory futures as a tool for expanding learning communities’ ideas of what is possible for the future.

Anna earned a certificate in foresight from the University of Houston and a certificate in social innovation design from the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a certified Master Trainer in the LEGO® Serious Play® Method.