At Cultivate, we are building a community where every aspiring changemaker has access to the tools they need to build a career they love. We believe that people are the most important resource we have for creating progressive change in the world. We care deeply about hiring, training, and retaining top talent in the progressive movement. This means investing in people throughout their entire careers and empowering organizations to build strong cultures that bring out the best in their teams.

Higher Ground Labs is a bridge between technology and politics. We support start-ups building products that help progressives win. We seek to discover new techniques for effective campaigning, spark and nurture new collaborations, and strengthen connectivity across progressive tech. We invest in companies building solutions to the most pressing campaign challenges and provide programming and mentorship to help our founders work fast and yield measurable long-term impact with fewer resources.

Marcus Ramirez

Partnerships Director

Marcus was born and raised in the Seattle area and is a proud child of Filipino immigrants.  A community builder & connector, he is passionate about educational equity & youth empowerment, and access to the arts for BIPOC communities. He graduated from the University of Washington in Art History and Economics and went on to serve two years of AmeriCorps at UW’s Riverways Education Partnerships, supporting partnerships and programming between UW and schools across Seattle and Washington State. He has prior experience at the Seattle Art Museum, working in education, community partnerships and programming, and supporting equity strategies, and at City Year as the Pacific Northwest-based campus recruiter. In his free time, Marcus loves to travel, cook and bake, being outdoors, and spending time with loved ones.

Robbie Ross

Chief Partnerships Officer

Robbie brings to bear over a decade of experience in scaling people operations at start-up organizations in the social impact space. Most recently, he wrapped up six years working at Purpose, where as Chief of Staff he oversaw global people & culture operations for a team of 80 spread across six continents. Prior to Purpose, he spent four years on the founding faculty of The School for Ethics & Global Leadership, a high school semester program in DC. 

Robbie carries a degree from Harvard College in Social Studies with a focus in “Human Rights and Development in Africa” and serves on the board of The Child Is Innocent, an NGO based in northern Uganda that provides high-quality education and leadership training to local kids. If he’s not working, he’s probably hiking El Camino or shamelessly recording layers of himself on Garageband.

Cara Burrell

Former Talent Acquisition Contractor

Cara is passionate about diversity, equity, and inclusion and developing social and economic solutions to improve societal welfare. She is currently pursuing a bachelor’s degree in kinesiology and psychology at William and Mary where she has had extensive experience in community building and outreach. Cara joined Cultivate in order to support people in various aspects of the progressive activism space, and help create a positive change in areas like housing, healthcare, and education.

Maria Lopez de la Cruz

Former Talent Acquisition Manager

Maria is the daughter of Mexican immigrants from Ameca, Jalisco, and was born and raised in the San Joaquin Valley. She comes to Cultivate with over 6 years of experience in the education nonprofit sector. Previously, Maria worked for Climb Hire where she led talent acquisition partnership efforts with over 40 tech companies across the country to create career pathways for first-generation salary earners, and at Alder Graduate School of Education she led recruitment, webinar, and partnership efforts to support and diversify the teacher workforce across 29 K-12 school districts in California. In addition to spearheading recruitment and partnership strategies, Maria has experience creating DEI affinity groups, events, programming, and equity-focused leadership development with an added emphasis on Latinx initiatives. Maria currently lives in Sacramento and holds a bachelor’s in Political Science from CSU Stanislaus and a master’s in Multicultural Education from CSU Sacramento. 

Sarah Stern

Founder

Sarah’s experience building and scaling teams from the ground up at the People’s Climate Lab at Purpose provided an opportunity to codify best practices for people and operations in a rapidly growing environment. She’s had the privilege of building digital strategies with some of the strongest teams in the progressive movement - from New Era Colorado to Everytown to Sierra Club. She founded Cultivate to enable organizations to build scalable infrastructure to hire, train, and retain diverse talent over time.

Derrick Stroman

Former Talent Acquisition Manager

Derrick is Brooklyn born and a graduate of CUNY. Early on in his career, he took what he learned from his experience in human resources and delivered career development training to students to help start their career. Now with almost a decade of experience in talent acquisition, he has worked with nonprofits, startups, and global companies to implement innovative strategies to build robust diverse talent pipelines. As a workforce development advocate, he is focused on breaking barriers to employment and making sure employers provide an equitable experience to all candidates. 

In his personal time, he enjoys traveling, cooking, and hoping the New York Knicks win a championship. 

Hillary Lehr

VP Partnerships, Higher Ground Labs

Hillary serves as Vice President of Partnerships at Higher Ground Labs where she coaches startup founders on how to scale their political technology startups. Previously, she created and scaled the client success and supports at Hustle from 0 to 20 staff, managed content partnerships at Brigade and Causes.com, and she spent five years innovating digital resources to scale nonprofit organizing campaigns. She earned BA and BS degrees from UC Berkeley where she serves as Board Vice President of the college alumni association.

Ryana Burrell

Former Recruitment Manager

Ryana was a founding member of the All Hands team. She is a multidisciplinary professional with 8 years of experience in recruiting, HR, and UX design. She is passionate about promoting civic engagement and developing spaces to help people practice congruence between their values and their daily work.

Ryana is currently pursuing her master’s degree in Design for Social Innovation, where her thesis aims to enable black millennials to address intergenerational conflict through creative storytelling. Ryana is also a photographer and mixed-media artist, and she loves to bake bread (rosemary garlic focaccia is a go-to recipe).

Guyang Chen-Ware

Former Designer

Guyang's idealism and love for visual problem solving has brought her to designing for the social impact space. Her passion lies in the intersection of branding, technology and social impact. She started her journey at The Climate Group as Global Designer, working on events such as ClimateWeekNYC. From there, she had the opportunity to work at Purpose and NRDC, where she helped develop the identity for Everytown.org, designed the early stages of the Foodstand app, and helped oversee the rebranding of a leading environmental nonprofit. Guyang recently worked on the branding for Cultivate and Compass Fellowships. Currently she is Design Director at Futerra, an agency that helps brands and nonprofits enact bold, positive change.

Christina Gutierrez

Former Talent Acquisition Director

Christina was a founding member of the All Hands team. Christina is passionate about people and the absolute ability they possess to reach their greatest potential. After a decade-plus in film, television, and Broadway stage production, she took the people process powers she built throughout her career and transferred them to HR & Talent Acquisition. Christina has led senior stakeholders, managing directors, and teams of peer interviewers towards more equitable recruiting practices, ensuring each candidate she comes into contact with is given the opportunity to be seen for the gem they are. She is dedicated to elevating diversity & inclusion through her innovative hiring practices, ongoing training & development opportunities, and good old fashioned candid conversations! A bicoastal resident, Christina loves nothing more than whipping up homemade dishes to feed the masses from NYC to LA.

Sophia Hain

Former Talent Acquisition Manager

Sophia comes from a nonprofit, research, and most recently education background where she supported students in their educational journey from matriculation to graduation. She brings her holistic, people-oriented, and human-centered approach to Talent Acquisition, advocating for candidates from application to placement as they build their career trajectory in the political and social impact spaces.

Having earned her master’s degree focusing on Diversity & Equity in Education from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, she brings a DEI lens grounded in intersectionality and is a firm believer in the importance of people’s lived experiences. Sophia is passionate about AANHPI community support, women’s rights, and immigration issues. During her personal time, Sophia enjoys spending time with her family and senior dogs while enjoying the endless amount of exciting activities in SoCal.

Kezia Matson

Community Consultant

Kezia is passionate about equity in health, education, and housing, and believes in achieving that through collaborative and creative initiatives. She has experience in project management and data analytics, with a focus on human-centered design. 

At Duke University, Kezia received a B.A. in Global Health and History, and sees both fields as complementary, necessitating socio-historical context for any successful project. As a University Scholar, her education was built within a network of interdisciplinary collaboration, laying the foundation for her professional perspective. Kezia has a soft spot for animals, and volunteers as a neo-natal foster, raising high-risk or abandoned kittens from birth. She lives on the East Coast, with her “foster fail,” Jupiter.