ALIA WHITNEY-JOHNSON

Co-Founder

Alia Whitney-Johnson is an experienced social entrepreneur with more than a decade of experience working with children who’ve endured trauma, sexual abuse, and exploitation. As Executive Director of Freedom Forward, she served as the Co-Chair of San Francisco’s Youth Trafficking Committee for the Mayor’s Task Force on Anti-Human Trafficking in 2017 and 2018, where she started the task force’s first Youth Advisory Board. Previously, Whitney-Johnson spent several years at McKinsey & Company as a management consultant, where she was tapped to lead its collaboration with Lean In and manage a national campaign focused on men and their important role in reaching gender equality.

Alia also founded and chairs Emerge Global, a nonprofit that has equipped over 1000 Sri Lankan girls who have survived sexual abuse with the business acumen, life skills, and financial resources needed to thrive in their adult lives. She has served on several boards including the MIT Corporation (MIT’s board of trustees), SERES Global, Emerge Lanka Foundation, and ATHack!. Whitney-Johnson holds a B.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes Scholar.