Stacey Childress is a Lecturer in the General Management unit at Harvard Business School, and a co-founder of the Public Education Leadership Project at Harvard University. She teaches in the School’s MBA and executive education programs. Stacey studies entrepreneurial activity in public education in the United States. This includes the behavior and strategies of leadership teams in urban public school districts, charter schools, and nonprofit enterprises with missions to improve the public system. She is also interested in a range of social enterprise topics, including international social entrepreneurship.

Prior to joining the faculty, Stacey served four years as Executive Director of the Social Enterprise Initiative (SEI) at Harvard Business School, the School’s effort to generate and share knowledge to help individuals and organizations deliver social value through the nonprofit, private, and public sectors.

Before working in academia, Stacey was co-founder of an enterprise software company and was responsible for generating the company’s first revenues. She also spent ten years in the electronic security industry in sales and general management, where as a regional general manager she successfully led the sales and operations functions of six offices across four states. She went on to launch a corporate university for her company, serving 12,000 employees in 148 offices nationwide. During this project, Stacey was involved in crafting public-private partnerships with state and local governments in conjunction with welfare-to-work job training initiatives.

Early in her career, Stacey taught in a Texas public high school. She is a graduate of Baylor University and Harvard Business School, where she was the first woman in school history to be elected by her classmates to deliver the Class Day graduation address.