Katie Sgarro is a social entrepreneur and LGBTQ advocate. During her senior year in college, she “came out” in order to co-found AsylumConnect. Her experience denying her own sexual orientation drives her to ensure that other LGBTQ people live freely. Sgarro has led AsylumConnect for 5 years in establishing the first ever online resource platform for LGBTQ asylum.

For her work on AsylumConnect, Sgarro was selected as the winner of MCC15’s Millennium Peace Prize at the United Nations and the 2015 Business Today Impact Challenge. In 2017, she was named to the Clinton Foundation’s CGI U Alumni Honor Roll of social innovators and as a Mogul Influencer. Sgarro was also named a Washington Post ’s WP BrandStudio Influencer in the nonprofit sector in 2018. In 2019, Sgarro became a Roddenberry Fellow and joined Urban Justice Center’s Social Justice Accelerator. She has been a featured speaker on LGBTQ rights and public good technology, and her work has appeared in national outlets including The HuffPost , Forbes.com, The Advocate , and The Hill.

Further, Sgarro co-founded and serves on the board of the ed-tech nonprofit UPchieve. She received a B.A. cum laude with distinction in Health & Societies from the University of Pennsylvania and a M.S. in Management from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.