Sydney Rogers is the founding Executive Director of Alignment Nashville, a 501c3 since 2004. Alignment Nashville’s purpose is to strategically align community organizations for greater impact in support of public education and children’s health. In this role, she has helped to pioneer the development of strategy, policy and tools to effectively engage the community in improving education and children’s health. A major effort of Alignment Nashville has been in support of the school district’s creation and development of the Academies of Nashville, a city-wide high school transformation effort that leverages and aligns business and community organizations around the re-designed high schools. Alignment Nashville engages more than 500 partners in the Nashville area. See alignmentnashville.org. In addition, through her role with Alignment Nashville, she serves as a consultant to Ford Next Generation Learning, developing strategy and models for effective business and community engagement across the country. Sydney served the community at Nashville State Community College and Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville for thirty years until 2005 where she retired as the Vice President of Community and Economic Development. During her tenure there, she was a faculty member, a department chair, Dean of Technology and Executive Vice President. While at the college, she led a 10-year effort to develop collaborative high school and college reform initiatives focused on the reform of teaching and learning with support and funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) where she founded an NSF Regional Center for Innovation in Technological Education (CITE), The Case Files project, South East Consortium for Advanced Technological Education, and Tennessee Exemplary Faculty for Advanced Technological Education, all statewide efforts. She is the co-founder of “Synergy” an NSF funded bi-annual national series of collaborative meetings to integrate multiple aspects of education reform. To date, “Synergies” have been held in Nashville, Boston, and Phoenix and have engaged teams of educational reformers from more than 20 states. The focus of her work in educational transformation has been in developing effective practices for creating new learning environments using authentic experiences, especially in the workplace and modeling effective methods for engaging businesses in education by using the “How People Learn” framework. A highlight of her work while at Nashville State was the development of the unique collaborative design for the Tennessee Board of Regents on-line degree program (RODP), one of the most successful on-line universities in the country. She has served on many local and national non-profit boards and NSF National Visiting Committees, presented numerous speeches, published papers and case studies, testified for the US Congress and National Academies. Sydney is especially interested in sustainability and the future of food production and distribution. She has 6 children and 14 grandchildren. She and her family are owners of Buffalo Valley Farm (BVF), a farm that uses sustainable practices in Nashville Tennessee. BVF distributes food directly to customers through CSAs and direct marketing. www.buffalovalleyfarmfoods.net