Elizabeth O’Brien is an accomplished, high-energy leader with expertise in national partnerships, non-profit relationship building, program development, and community engagement. Elizabeth O’Brien currently serves as the Board Chairman of Freedom Learning Group – an educational content and services provider powered by a global remote network of Military Spouses and Veterans.

Elizabeth, a Military Spouse, sits on The Blue Star Families Advisory Council, The Military Spouse Corporate Career Network Advisory Council, and The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Small Business Council. She chairs the state of Virginia Military Spouse Economic Empowerment Zone for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

Previously, Elizabeth served in significant leadership roles as a Senior Director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation’s Hiring Our Heroes and as Chairwoman for the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Advisory Committee on Veterans Business Affairs, the first Military Spouse named to the role. Prior to joining the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, O’Brien spent over a decade coaching college women’s basketball at the United States Military Academy at West Point, Hofstra University, and The University of Hawaii.

Elizabeth resides in the Washington, D.C. area with her family. On any given day, she and her family can be found competing or cheering one another on at a sporting event.

Michele Baird is the Chief Executive Officer of Freedom Learning Group and serves on its board of directors.

Before coming on board as CEO in April 2022, Michele had cultivated 35 years of experience in the education space, most recently as Chief Operating Officer of Six Red Marbles and was responsible for the company’s worldwide sales and operations. Prior to joining Six Red Marbles, she was Vice President of Enterprise Solutions at Cengage Learning, where she built a content services organization that developed over a thousand customized online courses for Higher Education customers. She also led the custom solutions line of business and brought the first outcomes-based online course product to market, which won a gold IMS Learning Impact award for impactful use of technology in support of learning and was named a CODIE finalist for best instructional solution. Michele earned a Bachelor of Economics at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and resides in South Carolina.

Ryan is a Managing Director at Achieve and University Ventures. Ryan’s commentary on where the puck is going in higher education regularly appears in the Gap Letter, Forbes, TechCrunch, Inside Higher Education, Fortune, HR Dive, and VentureBeat, among others. He is the author of A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College (Ben Bella, 2018), which describes the critical importance of last-mile training and the emergence of bootcamps, income share programs, staffing and apprenticeship models as preferred pathways to good first digital jobs and was named in the Wall Street Journal as one the Books of the Year for 2018. He is also the author of College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), which profiles the coming shift toward competency-based education and hiring.

Previously, Ryan led the Education & Training sector at Warburg Pincus where he was the founding Director of Zovio (NASDAQ: ZVO), originally Bridgepoint Education, the fastest growing online university in the U.S. His prior experience in online education was at Columbia University. From 2004 to 2010, Ryan founded and built Wellspring, a national network of boarding schools and summer camps for overweight and obese children, adolescents, and young adults. He began his career at McKinsey & Co.

Ryan received bachelor’s degrees summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University, and his law degree from the Yale Law School.

Cassidy Leventhal is a Vice President at Achieve and University Ventures where she was named a Forbes 30 Under 30 in Education. Previously, Cassidy was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, where she served public and private sector clients across strategy, organization, and technology initiatives. Key experiences included developing a cost strategy for a leading education company, managing an agile development team of 10+ as a Digital Product Owner (DPO), and leading the Firm’s women’s recruiting at multiple college campuses. Cassidy received her bachelor’s degree summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Barnard College, Columbia University.