Empowering People Worldwide

At Microsoft, Lucia Berliner '12 is part of Microsoft Elevate — the tech giant's new organization committed to widening the circle of opportunity by supporting nonprofits and schools. Her team works to help more than 20 million people earn credentials. She spends her days building capacity to scale the reach of this work through partnerships, programs and resources.

For Berliner, a Lenore K. Weinstein Social Service Scholarship recipient, this journey began at HWS with a documentary project mentored by Associate Professor of Media and Society Leah Shafer, where she interviewed farmers distributing free produce to low-income families.

She is grateful for the support of the Stephen W. Woodworth '54 Student Summer Fellowship, which enabled her to complete the project — an early proof point that the questions she cared about could become the work she did.

After graduating magna cum laude, Berliner moved to Arkansas and fell in love with teaching before earning an M.Ed. from Harvard. She then joined Microsoft, where she managed the company's free computer science education program for NYC schools and helped expand the footprint throughout the U.S. — ultimately reaching more than 100,000 students.

Nearly eight years later, she's still focused on broadening people's horizons. But now she supports initiatives for learners of all ages, and her scope is global. The undergraduate question — how do you design organizations where social impact is baked into the business model? — has become the daily work of her career.

The thread is consistent: ask who is being left out, then build something that includes them. As an undergraduate, that meant a documentary about food access. As a teacher, it meant the classroom itself. At Microsoft, it has meant computer science for NYC public schools, then American students more broadly, and now — through Microsoft Elevate — millions of learners around the world preparing for an AI-driven economy.

"I feel lucky to be on a team that's striving to equip as many people as possible with knowledge," she says. The luck, she would likely add, was running both ways from the start.