Emily Goulding is an educator and leader focused on social impact. A former professor at Occidental College, she is currently the Executive Director of Amplifier, a media lab that amplifies the most important issues of our times. During her tenure, Amplifier received a major public media award from the nation’s top communications school, and launched several communications campaigns about public health, civic engagement, and antiracism with partners including The Ad Council, Meta, the Emerson Collective, the Pop Culture Culture Collaborative, National Geographic, Levi’s, Unity, and more. Under her leadership, the Education Amplifier network built out partnerships with Discovery Education, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and Education Leaders of Color, produced conferences, and launched several suites of multi-modal, culturally relevant curriculum packages reaching over one million students across all 50 states. 

Prior to Amplifier, Emily supported innovation in the social sector through her Girasol Consulting practice, which helped clients clarify their value propositions and win multi-year grants. In total, she has helped direct 18 million dollars towards education, media, and arts programming that has won a National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award from Michelle Obama, a YCombinator placement, and more.

Emily has authored educational plays, video, radio, and web-based PSAs, news articles, and more. She has been invited to serve as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts’ Folk and Traditional Arts grants program, has been interviewed on ABC and FOX news and has guest lectured about culture shift and narrative change work in both Harvard and NYU journals.

She does this work because she is a mixed Latinx woman whose family includes both Pulitzer prize winning Irish American journalists and Central American immigrants. She got her master’s degree in Journalism from Georgetown University to answer the question, “How can media more accurately represent our shared community?” She also holds an undergraduate degree in Modern Literature from UC Santa Cruz, with a minor in Latin American and Latino Studies. 

She lives in northeast Los Angeles with her husband and two young boys, Caetano and Agustin.