About the Founder

Meet paige ponder

Paige Ponder, Founder of Idea Jar Strategies

Paige is an innovator and change-maker experienced in designing and scaling impactful programs and organizations and building lasting partnerships based on trust and shared goals.

Deeply committed to holistic student supports, equity in educational outcomes, and connecting overlooked talent to opportunity, Paige regularly consults with nonprofit leaders, college and university leaders, and funders who are working to eliminate racial disparities and income inequality by developing equitable education, training, hiring, and talent development practices across institutions and employers.  

Founder and CEO of Idea Jar
Paige 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. Immediately prior to launching Idea Jar, Paige served as Senior Advisor to the Pritzker Tech Talent Labs at Discovery Partners Institute, part of the University of Illinois System, whose vision is to make Chicago and Illinois the most equitable technology hub in the country.
Idea Jar Strategies logo
As CEO of One Million Degrees (OMD) 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, increasing the number of scholars served by 10x, building partnerships with 10 regional community colleges, and quintupling the budget and staff size.
Paige Ponder and her colleagues at a One Million Degree event
In 2016
OMD partnered with the University of Chicago Inclusive Economy Lab to conduct a randomized controlled trial of the model, which has shown that scholars who apply to OMD before enrolling in college are 70% more likely to enroll in community college, 94% more likely to persist from fall to spring semester, and 73% more likely to earn a degree than those who did not participate in the OMD program.
A preview of the controlled trial of the model done by One Million Degrees and the University of Chicago Inclusive Economy Lab
Based on the exciting findings of the randomized controlled trial and OMD’s strong track record of partnership and intensive student support, OMD is now partnering with City Colleges of Chicago to expand the model “wall to wall” at two of the seven colleges, with plans for total adoption across the system over the next five years. In 2022, OMD received $7 million from Mackenzie Scott, the largest gift in its history.
Read more about the trial
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 84% in 2023 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. Paige was included as a “boundary spanner” in the 2023 book How a City Learned to Improve its Schools by Tony Bryk et al chronicling the “extraordinary thirty-year reform effort that changed the landscape of public education in Chicago.”
The book "Upstream" by Dan Heath
Serving her community
Paige was appointed to the Chicago Board of Education by Mayor Lori Lightfoot in 2022, where she served until July 2023.
In 2018, she was appointed by Governor Bruce Rauner to the Illinois Community College Board, where she served until September 2022. She was a member of the Steering Committee for the Consortium on School Research at the University of Chicago from 2014 to 2023, and a 2019 Leadership Greater Chicago Fellow.
In 2022, she was awarded the John Fish ’55 Distinguished Service to the Community Award by the Princeton Club of Chicago. She is a current member of the Chicago Communities in Schools Leadership Council.
Education and Family
Paige graduated from Princeton University with a degree from the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. She earned an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. She lives in Chicago with her husband, their three teenage boys, and Wally and George, the dogs.
Three polaroid pictures of Paige Ponder's two gods, children, and husband.

‍View Paige's LinkedIn

Making a difference in the world can be a joyful, creative experience.

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