Fernande Raine, founder of The History Co:Lab, is a systems-change entrepreneur committed to strengthening democracy with the power of better history teaching. After spending much of her undergraduate years in Germany on student government and democracy building efforts in the former Soviet Union, she completed a PhD in History at Yale. She then joined McKinsey and after a few years was recruited to launch the social entrepreneurship organization Ashoka in Western Europe. She was a serial entrepreneur within Ashoka, starting and leading various programs for 12 years, with a sabbatical in the middle to run the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard, where she created a collaborative research project to reframe how we measure impact in the field of Human Rights. She launched The History Co:Lab in 2018 with seed funding from Ashoka to reorient our history education eco-systems towards preparing young people to succeed as changemakers. The History Co:Lab is a field building incubator for innovation in History, and has created an award winning youth podcast UnTextbooked, as well as several initiatives and networks that activate museums as sites of local, inspired learning.
