Emily Carter

I've dedicated over 20 years to nonprofit fundraising, starting in 2003. At Goodwill of North Georgia, where I serve as Vice President of Development, I raise funds to help job seekers with significant barriers to employment. We have 14 career centers where we provide training, job placement, and job retention services at zero cost to the job seeker. When I started at Goodwill in December 2020, I was given the gift of a blank slate - I literally had no prospects, no nothing, just the Goodwill name and my scrappy attitude. Our CEO, Keith Parker, challenged the board saying he had zero interest in moving people from unemployed to working poor - he wanted to provide top quality career training for high demand jobs. After 5 years, we're now raising an average of $2 million a year in philanthropy alone. Last October, I founded Wander Wing, an online application that teaches kids screen balance as a learned skill. The app features games with completion loops instead of endless feeds, so kids get a dopamine hit from completing something rather than constantly seeking the next thing. I won a pitch competition at Atlanta Tech Village and earned a free year of advisors from companies like Bark and Calendly. All my experience in nonprofits just makes me very scrappy, so I've been making it happen.