Quill Used By More Than One Million Low-Income Students in 2020 and Adds Nonprofit & Education Leaders to Board
January 13th, 2021
During 2020, in a school year made difficult by the COVID-19 pandemic, Quill.org saw its user base double, with teachers and parents using its free online tools to improve student writing. Quill.org’s writing tools are now being used by more than 1.8 million students, with 1.2 million students attending low-income, Title-1 eligible schools. With Quill, students develop their writing skills by constructing sentences and then receiving immediate feedback on their work, enabling them to revise their writing and quickly cement their learning.
As schools face continued challenges with remote learning, Quill.org, a nonprofit producing open source education technology for the public good, is now poised to scale nationally, and the organization has recruited two new board members, Tony Sebro, Deputy General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation, and Michael Conner, the Superintendent of Middletown Public Schools. In addition, Lila Jane Mabe has joined the leadership team as the Managing Director of Strategy & Impact to accelerate Quill.org’s growth.
Peter Gault, Quill.org's Executive Director, said, "We are grateful to be able to attract innovative and thoughtful nonprofit and education leaders to Quill's team to support our national growth. Our success as a nonprofit rests solely on the dedicated team of educators and technologists committed to building equitable and pedagogically robust learning tools to help millions of low-income students become strong writers and critical thinkers."
Board Member: Michael Conners, Ed.D, Superintendent of Middletown Public Schools
Michael Conner, Ed.D, joined the Quill.org board in December 2020. Michael is Superintendent of Middletown Public Schools in Connecticut. He is a former administrator in New Haven, Hartford, Windham, and Norwalk and began his career as an elementary school teacher. At Middletown, Michael leads the district’s efforts to use data and analytics to improve the student learning experience. As a Quill.org board member, Michael helps the organization think through its use of data to support school and district learning goals and advance its thinking on racial equity and pedagogical best practices. For more about Michael, please visit his LinkedIn profile.
Board Member: Tony Sebro, Deputy General Counsel at Wikimedia Foundation
Tony Sebro, Deputy General Counsel at the Wikimedia Foundation, joined the Quill.org board in December 2020. Tony serves as the Deputy General Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, home of Wikipedia and other free knowledge-related projects, where he oversees the day-to-day operations of the Foundation’s legal department. His broad practice has included contracts, intellectual property, business operations, trademarks, privacy, public policy, employment, community safety, product counseling, nonprofit governance, and litigation. Prior to joining the Wikimedia Foundation, Tony served as General Counsel for Software Freedom Conservancy—a public charity that acts as the home for more than 40 free and open source software projects, including Git, Samba, Selenium, and Inkscape. In 2017, Tony received the O’Reilly Open Source Award for his exceptional impact in open source software. He is also an organizer and member of the leadership committee for Outreachy, an initiative which provides paid internship opportunities to contribute to free and open source software projects. Outreachy expressly invites people from groups underrepresented in technology to participate. At Quill, Tony helps advance the organization on tech-related legal matters, nonprofit governance, open source, and racial equity and access in the software industry. For more about Tony, please visit his LinkedIn profile.
Leadership Staff: Lila Jane Mabe, Managing Director of Strategy and Impact at Quill.org
Lila Jane Mabe (aka LJ) joins Quill.org as a veteran nonprofit development and operations expert. In her 13 years in the nonprofit sector, she has made a significant impact at past organizations as diverse as the New York City Department of Education, the Future Project, Candid, and the Orr Group. As the Managing Director of Strategy and Operations, Lila Jane will oversee funder relationships, board management, and the scaling-up of operational processes. For more about LJ, please visit her LinkedIn profile. Lila Jane can be reached at lilajane@quill.org.
We congratulate our newest Quill.org team members, and we look forward to continued success at Quill. For more information, please contact the Quill team at hello@quill.org.
