The Woman Who Decided
Every Child Deserves
an MBA.
How a USC MBA graduate and mother of four walked into a Glendora classroom and started a movement that is rewriting the rules of who gets access to elite business education.
Cindy Ha
Founder & Executive Director, Young Innovators for Change
Est. 2025
Glendora, California
Credentials
USC Marshall MBA
Master of Business Administration, University of Southern California
Mother of Four
Firsthand insight into child development and education inequity
Glendora, California
Founder of the flagship YIC pilot district, 2022
1,200+ Students
Lives directly impacted through YIC programming to date
501(c)(3) Founder
Registered nonprofit focused on K-12 education equity
The Founder's Profile
As a mother of four children navigating the Los Angeles school system, she watched the gap widen year after year. Private schools ran entrepreneurship clubs. Prep academies offered investing courses. Meanwhile, the schools in Glendora, where she lived and worked, were lucky to have a single economics elective.
"I was not trying to start a movement. I was trying to answer one question: what happens if we give underserved kids the exact same tools we give MBA students?"
— Cindy HaIn 2022, she stopped asking the question and started running the experiment. Armed with her USC MBA frameworks and a deep understanding of how children actually learn, she designed an 8-week curriculum that compressed the essential pillars of a business education into a format that a 10-year-old could not just understand, but be genuinely excited by.
Twenty-two students. One classroom. A 100% completion rate and a waitlist of 80 for the next cohort. The experiment had its answer. Young Innovators for Change was born.
A Letter from the Founder
To Everyone Who Believes
a Child's Potential Should Never Have a Zip Code.
When I was studying at USC Marshall, surrounded by brilliant, ambitious people from around the world, I kept thinking about the students back home. Not because they were less brilliant. Not because they were less ambitious. But because they had never been given a language for their ambition.
Business has a vocabulary. Venture capital has a grammar. Leadership has a syntax. And for generations, that language has been taught only in classrooms that cost $50,000 a year to enter. Everyone else had to figure it out on their own — or not at all.
I am a mother before I am a founder. When I look at my four children, I see the same fire I see in every student who walks into a YIC classroom. The difference is access. That is the only difference. And access is a problem we know how to solve.
This is not charity. This is not pity. This is equity. We are not giving children something they could not earn themselves — we are removing the artificial barrier that was never supposed to be there in the first place.
If you are reading this as a potential partner, as a parent, as an administrator, or simply as someone who believes what I believe — that potential is universal and opportunity should be too — then you already understand why this work cannot wait.
The boardroom has no age limit. And it has no zip code requirement either. Not anymore.
Cindy Ha
Founder & Executive Director, Young Innovators for Change
Glendora, California · 2022 – Present
Advisory Board
The Minds
Behind the Mission.
Our advisory board brings together education leaders, venture capitalists, nonprofit strategists, and academic experts united by a single conviction: that access to elite business education is a civil rights issue. Official portraits will be added as board members are formally announced.
James Wilson
Partner, Sequoia Capital
Maria Lopez
Superintendent, LAUSD
Dr. Raj Patel
Dean, USC Marshall School
Sandra Chen
SVP, JP Morgan Chase
Thomas Okafor
CEO, BridgePoint Ventures
Elena Kowalski
Director, Gates Foundation
Brian Martinez
Principal, Roosevelt Elementary
Aisha Siddiqui
Professor, UCLA Anderson
Interested in joining our Advisory Board?
We are actively seeking advisors in education policy, EdTech, corporate CSR, and venture philanthropy.
The Invitation
Join the
Movement.
The boardroom Cindy Ha is building has room for partners, administrators, donors, and believers. If you see what she sees — a generation of kids who deserve a seat at the table — we want to hear from you.