Amber Scott, the Founder and Executive Director of Leap Year, is a respected social innovation leader with a proven ability to combine vision and business acumen with well-developed leadership and management skills for effective organizational creation and management.  A child of first generation college students, the importance of higher education, and the power that it can have to raise a family out of poverty, was instilled at a very young age.  However, today low income students struggle to attend and graduate from college, making economic mobility nearly impossible.  Amber believes that the opportunity for higher education should be open to everyone, regardless of where you are born, so she founded Leap Year to challenge the status quo.

Amber’s passion for social justice began with a trip to Kenya. Immediately following her college graduation, Amber traveled to northern Kenya with a $10,000 grant to build two water wells in hopes of decreasing the inter-tribal violence which was occurring due to local water scarcity. After returning to the US, Amber transitioned to a job with the United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta as a Project Manager for the Regional Commission on Homelessness. In this position she oversaw and implemented several innovative projects with local government and nonprofit agencies to help break the cycle of chronically homeless revolving through jails and emergency rooms.

Amber leveraged her experience with her academic training by opening her own consulting firm, Carpe Diem Consulting.  She worked as a nonprofit and social enterprise consultant following her passion for using business models to address the most pressing social issues.  Amber is also the Founder and President of the Greater Atlanta Chapter of the Social Enterprise Alliance.  She holds a BA in Neuroscience from Smith College, and an MBA in Marketing and Strategy from The Ohio State University.

In her free time Amber enjoys independent cinema, photography, and travel.  She is proficient in Spanish, has lived in two foreign countries, and has visited thirty countries on six continents.