Alia Whitney-Johnson
Alia Whitney-Johnson is an experienced social entrepreneur with over fifteen years of experience working with children who’ve endured trauma, sexual abuse, and exploitation. She was the Founding Executive Director of of Freedom Forward (www.freedom-forward.org), a San Francisco-based nonprofit working to prevent the commercial sexual exploitation of youth by transforming the systems that too often contribute to their exploitation. Through her work at Freedom Forward, she focused on bringing providers, youth, and government together to reimagine systems to better serve youth across San Francisco and beyond – including developing the HYPE Center, a multi-services drop-in center for youth, and FAM, a family based foster care program for youth who have experienced or are clear concern for commercial sexual exploitation. She also served as Co-Chair of the Youth Trafficking Committee for the San Francisco Mayor’s Task Force on Anti-Human Trafficking, where she started the task force’s first Youth Advisory Board and a year-long healing-centered leadership fellowship for youth.
Previously, Alia 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 Lanka Foundation (www.emergelanka.org), a nonprofit that has equipped over 1,100 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) and SERES Global, an organization equipping young people to build just and sustainable communities across Central America. She 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.