Julie Clugage, MBA ’02, didn’t plan to change the world. She planned to spend six months in the mountains of western Guatemala.
In 1990, fresh out of college, Julie accepted a fellowship to teach at a newly built secondary school for Mayan youth in Guatemala. There was no internet in the village. No phones. What she did find was a room full of students who were talented, motivated, and had never had a real shot at higher education. She set up a small computer lab with a few donated Macs and taught basic word processing. Even that small thing created large changes. Students grew more confident. Doors began to open.
Six months became two years. And the question that took root there—what becomes possible when you give underserved young people access to technology and learning—never left her.
That question carried her to the World Bank in Washington, D.C., where she spent five years working in international development. Then, in 2000, she came to Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, drawn by another question: could the corporate technology sector be a genuine, agile force for education equity in low-income communities around the world?
At Haas, she dove into research on corporate technology programs in emerging markets, including a project on HP’s e-Inclusion initiative that gave her an inside view of how private sector companies approached social impact. She participated in the International Business Development program in Costa Rica. She studied entrepreneurship. And she felt something she would later describe as already present in the people and curriculum at Haas long before it was formalized into the school’s leadership principles: “Beyond Yourself.”
“I loved that ‘Beyond Yourself’ was already a strong current running through the people and curriculum at Haas,” she says. It was, in many ways, the intellectual home her Guatemala experience had been preparing her for.
After graduating in 2002, she joined Intel as a finance analyst and worked her way into the company’s Corporate Affairs Group, where she managed partnerships to scale Intel’s global education programs. She focused on teacher training, 21st-century skills, and the use of technology in low and middle-income classrooms. Then she moved to a newly created business unit producing the Intel Classmate PC, a low-cost, laptop built for K-12 students in the developing world.
It was there that she launched the Intel Education Service Corps, matching teams of skilled Intel employees with education NGOs using their technology in communities around the world. When the first call for volunteers went out, 15 spots were available. More than 500 Intel employees applied.
That number revealed that there was deep hunger, particularly among millennial tech workers, for meaningful work. And there was a gap between the resources sitting inside technology companies and the organizations on the ground who desperately needed them.
In 2012, she co-founded Team4Tech with her former Intel manager, Lila Ibrahim, to bridge that gap.
Today, Team4Tech is a nonprofit impact accelerator that provides technology grants and training to NGOs focused on education for employability in underserved communities worldwide. It partners with more than 1,000 grassroots organizations across 109 countries and has reached more than 40 million people.
The proof points are extraordinary. Students from Kenya Connect, a Team4Tech NGO partner in rural Kenya, have won the Kenya Robotics Olympiad two years running, then traveled to Turkey and Singapore to compete in the global finals. “Just like with my students in Guatemala 30 years ago, it gives me such joy and satisfaction to see these talented students presented with opportunities to grow and achieve.”
That a computer lab with donated Macs in the Guatemalan mountains led to a robotics podium in Singapore says everything about what this work has become.
Julie was recently named in the Forbes 50 Over 50: Impact list, recognizing women trailblazers redefining what leadership looks like. She still mentors students in Haas’s entrepreneurship program, as committed as ever to the power of technology to change lives.
Her advice to anyone wanting to build a career at the intersection of ambition and service is characteristically clear-eyed: “Start with your goal and then be open and flexible about how you approach it. It’s more about where you feel you can make the greatest contribution at any point in time, and what unlocks your creativity and motivation, than any specific role.”
Photo Credits: Julie Clugage, MBA ’02
