Dr. Omolara Fatiregun
Thrive Industries Incorporated (THRIVE!)

Personal Bio

Dr. Omolara O. Fatiregun is Founder & CEO of THRIVE!, a venture that uses technology to spark citizen engagement in government and root out inequity in municipal spending and policies. Omolara designed THRIVE!’s equity algorithm based on her 20-year career as a cabinet level official in DC’s juvenile justice agency, foundation executive, and applied researcher. She has won many innovation awards including MIT Solve, HP Prize for Advancing Digital Equity, Morgan Stanley-Centri Tech Social Justice Innovation Award, and fellowships from Halcyon and Camelback. Omolara's work has been featured in Boston Globe, Washington Business Journal, and Nasdaq.com.

Omolara earned a bachelor’s in sociology and African American Studies from Harvard, a master’s in public policy from Georgetown, and a doctorate in education leadership from Harvard.

Project Description

THRIVE! tackle shortfalls at the intersection of public education, public finance, and technology. Powered by generative AI and synthetic data free of racial bias, our platform identifies optimal (and suboptimal) investments—in labor, staff time, and programs—to help governments create budgets and management plans that mitigate disparities. We began our work in public schools. The societal impact is the ability to scale improved budgeting and management practices nationally at a time when school districts are experiencing widening achievement gaps amidst budget shortfalls, while the technological impact is the generation of non-biased synthetic data for training algorithms; this will eliminate algorithmic bias and revolutionize public finance. For these efforts, THRIVE! was honored as the #1 Social Justice Innovation for Fast Company’s 2024 World Changing Ideas Awards.