Ruthe Farmer is the Founder and CEO of Last Mile Education Fund and a systems leader expanding who gets to shape the technologies that shape our world. For nearly three decades—from the Girl Scouts to the White House—she has designed and scaled initiatives that open pathways into computing and engineering for millions of young people, particularly women and communities historically excluded from the innovation economy.

Across government, philanthropy, and civil society, Farmer has built enduring movements that broaden participation in the innovation economy. At the White House, she helped catalyze the global momentum behind Computer Science for All, and throughout her career she has launched initiatives such as NCWIT Aspirations in Computing—now a 35,000-member community of women in technology—and co-created TECHNOLOchicas, a bilingual campaign inspiring millions of Latinas across the Americas to explore technology careers.

Farmer’s work challenges a persistent assumption in education and workforce systems: that talent is scarce and must be narrowly filtered through traditional markers of merit. Her leadership advances an abundance approach—the recognition that weed-out models of talent identification no longer serve society. Through Last Mile Education Fund, she is pioneering a safety-net model to ensure that low-income students pursuing technical degrees have the resources to persist and thrive, demonstrating how small, timely interventions can unlock vast human potential.

Raised in poverty and moving frequently as a child, Farmer understands firsthand how easily talent can be overlooked. Her work is driven by a simple conviction: when institutions are built to recognize and support the full abundance of human talent, the technologies shaping our future can be created by the full diversity of humanity.