Dr. Omolara Fatiregun

Using AI to Expand Economic Opportunity in the U.S.

Why This Work Matters

Public systems spend billions each year on workforce development, job training, and education — and yet the people who need economic mobility most are consistently left out. The problem usually isn't the programs. It's the decisions about which programs get funded, and who gets considered a likely beneficiary. AI is already shaping those decisions, and without deliberate intervention, it will keep automating the same inequities that historical data reflects.

We're supporting this work because Dr. Fatiregun has spent her career at exactly this intersection — inside government agencies, in the field with communities, and building the tools to change it. This Fellowship gives her the protected time to build a framework that does.

The Work

Dr. Fatiregun will map the full workforce development ecosystem — schools, juvenile justice agencies, workforce boards, community colleges, mayor's offices — to understand where investment decisions are made, what assumptions shape them, and where women and historically excluded communities are systematically left behind.

From that foundation, she'll design a workforce-specific AI decision-support framework trained not on historical data that encodes past inequity, but on academic research that models what equitable investment decisions should look like. She will conduct 25–40 stakeholder interviews, produce a detailed implementation roadmap, and secure pilot commitments from at least five partner organizations before May 2027.

The Fellow

Dr. Omolara Fatiregun

Founder & CEO, THRIVE Industries · Washington, D.C.

Omolara's path to this work runs through two formative experiences. The first: her mother, a newly emigrated Nigerian file clerk at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, was offered free college tuition as an employee benefit. That single budget decision enabled a pharmacist's career — and eventually sent two children to Harvard. The second: as Acting Deputy Director of Washington D.C.'s juvenile justice agency, she oversaw investments in mentoring and job training and found that many were actively causing harm — short-term matches that re-traumatized youth when they ended, employment pipelines that excluded girls and watched their re-arrest rates rise. The system hadn't set out to perpetuate cycles of poverty. It simply funded what it had always funded.

In 2021, she founded THRIVE Industries to help governments and grantmaking foundations make better resource allocation decisions. THRIVE has served 120,000 residents across California, Massachusetts, and Utah — leading Somerville to redirect $500,000 toward parent-focused workforce programs, and shifting teacher mindsets in Park City from deficit thinking to high expectations for all students. Fast Company named THRIVE the #1 Social Justice Innovation of 2024. Dr. Fatiregun holds a doctorate from Harvard, a master's in public policy from Georgetown, and an undergraduate degree from Harvard College.