Carrie Leung

Carrie Leung is a maker-educator focused on building open community platforms for young makers, innovative educators, and cutting-edge industry to collaborate, learn, and connect. She has spent the last eight years in Shenzhen, China teaching in project-based learning classrooms and exploring ways to embed the maker mindset and real-life experiences into education. Outside the classroom, she built non-profit programs and spaces, MakeFashion Edu and SteamHead, to connect her community of schools, teachers, and companies with each other and to leverage the amazing technology manufacturing resources that Shenzhen is famous for.

Carrie believes it’s all too common, in communities across the world, that these kind of collaborative opportunities exist but are not taken advantage of: whether that’s due to lack of connections, insular organizational culture, or competitiveness, the fact is that open-source collaboration and sharing is the best path for everyone to thrive and to make relevant education accessible.

Carrie is a San Francisco Native who left her Silicon Valley tech-finance career in order to make meaningful opportunities for the next generation, but her background affords her an insight into the complex corporate world—both its flaws and the kind of social good that could be possible if these powerful entities adopted better incentives and took a broader view of the world. She also learned to be pragmatic, to take gains where gains could be had, to counter strength with strength, but to offer support to those without the voice and power to stand against the world. She much prefers to empower others over taking center stage; her goal is to create sustainable community systems that can outlive and outlast any single person and remain meaningful into the future.