Overview
Taylor Conger is a Lecturing Fellow with the Master of International Development Policy Program and is the former Managing Director of the Duke-UNICEF Innovation Accelerator, which worked to identify, assess, develop, and scale the impact of sustainable solutions to the most pressing challenges facing children and youth around the world. Housed at Duke’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative (I&E) and in partnership with UNICEF, the Accelerator helped social entrepreneurs acquire the knowledge, tools, and networks they need to achieve maximum impact. The Accelerator program was sunset in December 2023. Currently, Taylor serves as a Senior Program Officer at VentureWell, a nonprofit organization that cultivates a pipeline of inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs driven to solve complex social problems.
Prior to Duke-UNICEF and VentureWell, Taylor supported and advised hundreds of social entrepreneurs across the globe through her work as an independent consultant and leadership coach, and previously as Deputy Director at Echoing Green, a premier global social impact accelerator based in New York City. During her tenure at Echoing Green, Taylor helped to select and evaluate five classes of Fellows, built and led capacity-building programs for Fellows and alumni, and planned large-scale, global social innovation conferences. Before her work at Echoing Green, Taylor designed and managed a domestic fellowship program at the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, which developed promising global citizens into nonprofit leaders. Additionally, Taylor has worked with globally-minded, socially driven MBAs as a manager at the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford University, and in refugee resettlement at the International Rescue Committee in Northern California. Her work has taken her to nearly three dozen countries across four continents.
Taylor serves on the Advisory Committee as an industry leader for the Program on Social Entrepreneurship at the Stanford University Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and is on the Board of Directors of Govuka, a nonprofit dedicated to the sexual and reproductive health of adolescent girls in Eswatini. She holds an undergraduate degree in English Literature from Marist College, a Master’s in Public Health and Forced Migration from the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, and a Master’s of Science in Social Work and Social Enterprise Administration, also from Columbia University.