Maia Sciupac

Maia is the CoFounder and Chief Design Strategist at Create&, a firm that crowdsources big ideas for nonprofits and startups, through community design sprints. Previsouly, she worked as a Product Manager at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. With over 10 years of experience in the anti-trafficking field, she previously worked as a Program Manager and Creative Lead at Thorn, an organization that develops technology to fight the sexual exploitation of children. While there, she helped build Spotlight, a machine learning tool that helps law enforcement identify victims of trafficking online. Maia is also a human trafficking consultant for the Department of Justice. Prior to that, she spearheaded the Alameda County District Attorney Office's, Human Exploitation and Trafficking (H.E.A.T.) Watch Program, a nationally-recognized, award-winning initiative to combat modern-day slavery. While at H.E.A.T. Watch, Maia helped build the program into a 5-point strategy to include an annual billboard campaign, graphic novel series, radio show, and online toolkit to name a few. Maia also has experience working directly with survivors as a 2010 Client Services & Outreach Fellow for Polaris, a national NGO dedicated to combatting domestic human trafficking, and starting her own radio show about modern-day slavery. Recently, she launched her own innovation consulting firm, Create&, to help organizations and social entrepreneurs launch big ideas through design thinking, lean business principles, and storytelling. One initiative out of Create& is UNLeaded, a meetup for creative individuals in the DMV area who want to solve complex problems for good, through community-centered design. Maia graduated with a BA, summa cum laude, from UC Berkeley, and is pursuing her MBA from Johns Hopkins University. She is passionate about building great products, and loves to nerd out about all things product development. Currently, she lives in Washington D.C. with her husband, and is a native of the SF Bay Area.