Kiley Larson

Kiley comes to ReUp with over 15 years of experience in education, research, and product development. At New York University, she co-led a multi-state distributed research team to evaluate the effectiveness of the MacArthur Foundation’s 240M digital media and learning funding portfolio. Out of that work, she was tapped to oversee user research and product strategy at LRNG, an ed-tech platform built to help young people discover new learning experiences and connect them to career pathways. Since then, she’s been an entrepreneur, running a successful consulting agency that focused on clients, both nonprofit and for-profit, invested in the social good. One of her clients, the DeBruce Foundation, funded her to develop a strategy to scale the work of a Kansas City nonprofit – KC Degrees – which focused on supporting stopout students in returning to regional schools.

Kiley grew up on a farm in a town of 5 people. That experience equipped her with a love for problem-solving and learning, which is how she came to earn a Ph.D. in Communication Studies – with an emphasis on digital technologies – from the University of Kansas. She is dedicated to anti-racism practices, personally, professionally, and in the public sphere. In her free time, she enjoys fixing things, reading books, climbing trees with her 6- and 8-year-old children, and wandering aimlessly through art museums (or at least she will if this pandemic ever ends).