Why we do what we do

The Compass Fellowship is a project of Cultivate.

At Cultivate, we are building a community where every aspiring changemaker has access to the tools they need to build a career they love. We believe that people are the most important resource we have for creating progressive change in the world. We care deeply about hiring, training, and retaining top talent in the progressive movement. This means investing in people throughout their entire careers, and empowering organizations to build strong, inclusive cultures that bring out the best in their teams.

Our Team

Sarah Stern, Founder

Sarah’s experience building and scaling teams from the ground up at the People’s Climate Lab at Purpose provided an opportunity to codify best practices for people and operations in a rapidly growing environment.

She’s had the privilege of building digital strategies with some of the strongest teams in the progressive movement - from New Era Colorado to Everytown to Sierra Club. She founded Cultivate to enable organizations to build scalable infrastructure to hire, train, and retain diverse talent over time.

Ryana Bryan, Recruiter

Ryana is a multidisciplinary professional with 8 years of experience in recruiting, HR, and UX design. She is passionate about promoting civic engagement and developing spaces to help people practice congruence between their values and their daily work.

Ryana is currently pursuing her master’s degree in Design for Social Innovation, where her thesis aims to enable black millennials to address intergenerational conflict through creative storytelling. Ryana is also a photographer and mixed-media artist, and she loves to bake bread (rosemary garlic focaccia is a go-to recipe).

Lila Schreiber, Training Manager

Specializing in engaging audiences to create social change, Lila has 15 years of experience designing, leading, and winning innovative advocacy campaigns. From strategic conception through tactical implementation, she knows how to get things done. A master storyteller across mediums, an expert facilitator, and a point guard on and off the court, Lila is thrilled to be part of the Cultivate team. She has run scores of advocacy campaigns with dozens of organizations, from the ACLU, to the Wildlife Conservation Society, to electoral political campaigns. She has been lucky to work alongside brilliant organizers, activists, and strategists and to learn from organizing legend Marshall Ganz at the Harvard Kennedy School. Lila is always down to nerd out about Network Theory, hip-hop, or grilling. She holds a degree in Government and Mind Brain Behavior from Harvard College.

Maya Cantrell, Community Manager

Maya is an Extremely Online™ TikTok fanatic from the Bay Area (by way of St. Louis). She started her career at a small educational tech startup in NYC, but left soon after to start organizing for Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire in early 2016 and then to run the digital organizing program in North Carolina through the rest of the election. Since then she’s worked for and with a number of candidates, state parties, and committees to build digital programs that effectively reach millions of volunteers and voters.

Maya is most proud of getting Doug Jones elected to the Senate, her 9 thriving houseplants, and her ever-changing skincare routine. Her only wish for 2020 is for more candidates to get on TikTok.

Michael Dinnall

Lover of a good meme. Michael is passionate about web development, finds nothing more satisfying than bringing designs to life. Constantly exploring and prototyping new ideas, he'll jump at the chance to be involved in any aspect of a project that brings more smiles and has a chance to unite the world a little more. In his spare time, Michael utilizes his creative talents building web games, playing soccer, basketball or planning his monthly game night with friends. Favorite film is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but he is always open for suggestions.

Guyang Chen-Ware, Designer

Guyang's idealism and love for visual problem solving has brought her to designing for the social impact space. Her passion lies in the intersection of branding, technology and social impact. She started her journey at The Climate Group as Global Designer, working on events such as ClimateWeekNYC. From there, she had the opportunity to work at Purpose and NRDC, where she helped develop the identity for Everytown.org, designed the early stages of the Foodstand app, and helped oversee the rebranding of a leading environmental nonprofit. Guyang recently worked on the branding for Cultivate and Compass Fellowships. Currently she is Design Director at Futerra, an agency that helps brands and nonprofits enact bold, positive change.

Nikhil Bhargava

Nikhil is a recent PhD in Computer Science from MIT. At MIT, he worked Artificial Intelligence in model-based and embedded robotic systems, and his thesis work was on multi-agent coordination under uncertain and limited communication. Nikhil currently spends most of his time working on his startup, which focuses on building better deployment solutions for enterprise software companies.