Damian Ewen is a project director for Opportunity@Work. From 2015-2016, Opportunity@Work was based at New America.
Ewen is a career educator and tech entrepreneur with a passion for helping people earn a living by being themselves. Prior to joining Opportunity@Work, Ewen was the co-founder and CEO of Achievery, one of the world’s first digital credentialing companies that provided secure hosting and verification of new and emerging skills credentials in over 80 countries. Ewen and his co-founder and CTO worked closely with the Mozilla and MacArthur Foundations on the development of the first open standards for digital credentials and Open Badges. Achievery developed the first visual displayer, drupal module, and directory (an open source search and indexing system) for Open Badges.
Prior to Achievery, Ewen was the founding director of the Hub, the high school initiative of the Providence After School Alliance, where he led the development of the first system in the country where high school students earned graduation credit and digital credentials for learning outside of school. Previously, Ewen taught in 6th-12th grades in some of the most innovative public schools in the country. Ewen spent four years teaching in the Big Picture Learning schools and then worked closely doing communications, development, and new school startups with the co-founders, Elliot Washor and Dennis Littky, as Big Picture Learning scaled internationally.
Ewen holds a master of arts in education (mathematics) from Stanford University and a BS in economics from Santa Clara University. He is based in Rhode Island, where he lives with his wife and two daughters.