Big Ideas Fest Speakers Angela Jackson
Angela Jackson is an award winning social entrepreneur. After spending a successful career in corporate America—most recently as the head of New Channels Marketing for Nokia—Angela combined her corporate management experience with her expertise of language educators, and founded Global Language Project (GLP), in 2009. She established GLP to teach disadvantaged students proficiency in a foreign language, to prepare them for higher education scholarship opportunities and to ultimately compete in a global workforce. After having lived abroad in over 60 countries, Angela’s transition from Corporate America to Social Venture with the launch of GLP was a matter of perfect timing and perfect synergy.
Global Language Project is a non-profit that focuses its language teaching specifically on elementary school children in underserved public schools, to instill in children from a young age that learning a second language can be one of the most lucrative assets they can attain. GLP provides free language programs in Arabic, French, Mandarin, and Spanish in communities throughout New York and Rhode Island. In five short years, Angela has raised more than $2 million dollars to change the trajectory of hundreds of young lives, by empowering them with valuable knowledge of a second language.
Angela is a sought after corporate speaker on various topics, including maintaining the competitive advantage in the American workforce. She was recently awarded the 2014 Edwin Cudecki award for her work advocating for world languages by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL). Angela is currently a featured columnist for the Tribune newspaper group where her column, The Language of Life, is distributed in the top 40 markets nationwide.