Stephen Yadzinski is the senior innovation officer at Jobs for the Future. In this role, he works with JFF leaders and teams to identify new opportunities, establish new partnerships, and transform JFF programs and service lines to meet an evolving and dynamic education and workforce ecosystem, leveraging the fields of design, technology, and innovation to further our mission.

Passionate about the role technology can play in creating business-aligned education and workforce social impact, Steve also serves as the executive director of Education Quality Outcomes Standards (EQOS), a nonprofit that JFF acquired in February of 2022. The EQOS vision is to become the most useful and user-friendly source of trusted information on the quality of short-term education and training programs and credentials in the United States.

Previously, Steve served as chief technology officer and founder of Innovate+Educate’s Employment Tech division, which was created to address the critical need to improve workforce readiness for high-demand jobs in key U.S. industries. Under Steve’s leadership, the division grew to include organizational psychologists, data scientists, user interface designers and developers, and other specialists who worked to create leading-edge mobile technologies, assessments, and labor-market insights that connected Americans living at or near poverty with education, training, and quality jobs.

Earlier in his career, Steve founded and led his own branding, communications, and technology consultancy. The organization grew to serve a national clientele with marquee projects that included Emirates Airline’s North American advertising operations and photo books presented to President Barak Obama in support of National Monument designations across the Southwest.

A graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology, Steve lives with his wife and two children in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and enjoys backpacking and skiing in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near his home.

Shauna Pratico is a senior program manager at Jobs for the Future. She works primarily on projects related to JFF’s acquisition of Education Quality Outcomes Standards (EQOS), a nonprofit that has developed a framework for assessing the quality of education and training programs that issue credentials.

Before joining JFF, Shauna held project and program management roles in a variety of organizations in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, including the United Nations, International Service for Human Rights, Fondation d’Harcourt, and Miro.

Her responsibilities ranged from creating capacity-building programs and large-scale advocacy campaigns to testing and rolling out technical software.

In one recent role, she led a team at the City University of New York Research Foundation in the design, implementation, and scaling of a statewide training program and technical help desk for more than 10,000 early childhood care providers.

“Working at JFF allows me to address issues relevant to the workforce today and contribute to solutions that impact the future,” she says. “As the landscape of the credential market continues to rapidly change and grow, a trusted assessment of provider quality and value is urgently needed. Given JFF’s relationships with colleges, training providers, employers, and workforce systems, EQOS is uniquely positioned to provide exactly that.”

Shauna holds a bachelor’s degree from Siena College in Loudonville, New York, and a master’s in public administration from the Rockefeller College of Public Affairs & Policy at the University at Albany. While working on her master’s degree, she completed a graduate certificate in public sector management with a specialization in public economics and finance. Shortly after graduating, she obtained a certification in Humanitarian Affairs from Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy.

Outside of work, Shauna enjoys traveling, writing, and spending time with her family.

Eugene So is a managing director at Jobs for the Future. He is a member of the Postsecondary Market Solutions team in JFFLabs, where he will help drive the growth and innovation of JFF’s market-focused strategy to redesign the connection between education and workforce systems to better serve the needs of workers and learners.

Eugene has spent 15 years working in the global education field. He has been a teacher and a career advisor, and most recently he led strategic partnership and product development initiatives for two major education companies.

Before joining JFF, he served as the director of academic programs and pathways at InStride, where he led a team tasked with creating diverse workforce education solutions in collaboration with corporations, higher education institutions, and postsecondary education providers.

Earlier in his career, Eugene served as the associate vice president for global solutions at Shorelight Education. In that role, he helped drive portfolio and program development and created innovative business and delivery models that empowered universities to scale content and curriculum to reach a broad global learner base.

His skills and areas of expertise include:

• Postsecondary partnership development
• Skills-based learning model development
• Workforce development initiatives
• Comparative education system analysis

Eugene has a bachelor’s degree in history, with a minor in education, from the University of California, Irvine, and a master’s degree in international and comparative education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Eugene was born and raised in Southern California, where he currently lives with his wife, Terry, and their two dogs, Otis and Koko. He’s an avid golfer and snowboarder, and an amateur (very amateur) ceramicist. A lover of movies and music, he started a punk/hip-hop record label for local artists when he was in his early twenties.

Michael Horn is a senior strategist at Guild Education and award-winning author of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. Michael brings substantive expertise around education innovation, regulation, and accreditation of K-12 and postsecondary institutions.

Ted Mitchell is the president of the American Council on Education and brings a wide array of experience and accomplishments from across the higher education sector, as well as a long-standing focus on helping students gain access to postsecondary education and complete their degrees.

Elise Scanlon is the founder and principal of a Washington, D.C. based law and consulting practice focused on advising accrediting organizations and higher education institutions on federal higher education policy, state and federal regulation, and quality assurance and improvement.

Tameshia Bridges Mansfield is vice president for workforce innovation at JFF. She oversees workforce development and future-of-work initiatives with an eye toward innovation and system transformation. Before joining JFF, Tameshia was a program officer at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Tameshia is a co-chair of the board of the Clean Slate Initiative and a member of the boards of the Detroit Justice Center and the Chicago Jobs Council. She previously served as co-chair of Workforce Matters, where she was instrumental in the creation of the Racial Equity Framework for Workforce Funders.

Lisette Nieves is the president of the Fund for the City of New York (FCNY), an institution charged with developing and helping to implement innovations in policy, programs, practices, and technologies to improve the functioning of government agencies and nonprofit organizations in New York City and beyond. Before joining FCNY, Lisette was the director of educational leadership and policy studies and a full clinical professor at NYU Steinhardt.