Chief Everything Officer, Sphaera
Dr. Astrid J. Scholz is the CEO of Sphaera, a for-purpose, for-profit tech company dedicated to accelerating the pace of change. By making it easy and rewarding to share, innovate, aggregate, measure, and finance solutions across what is currently a highly fragmented social innovation landscape, Sphaera and its partners are building a global infrastructure for mobilizing innovations and capital at the scale required to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Astrid was previously President of Ecotrust, where Sphaera was incubated in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation, Mercy Corps, Oxfam, the Island Institute and other likeminded organizations. She has served on several advisory bodies for public-private partnerships for conservation and social outcomes, including the State of California’s Marine Life Protection Act Initiative. Astrid is a founding board member of the XXcelerate Fund, a revolving loan fund created for and by women entrepreneurs that is piloting in her home state of Oregon, USA. She serves on the boards of Habitat Media, Living Oceans Society and COBI (Communidad Y Biodiversidad), and is a speaker on social innovation, the business of philanthropy, and the role of technology for world-positive change. She is a co-author of the Zebra Manifesto, a call to action for companies that build ambitious technology for systemic change, and co-convener of the first gathering of zebra companies in the fall of 2017. Astrid holds degrees from the University of St. Andrews, the University of Bristol, and the University of California, Berkeley.
