Founder, Ascend Advisory LLC
Sara Boyd is Founder of Ascend Advisory, an Omaha-based premier boutique social impact advisory helping communities, social enterprise teams, and purpose-driven leaders realize their potential. Specializing in organizational capacity building, landscape needs analysis, leadership coaching and transition support and innovation pilot project design, Ascend Advisory's personalized guidance is informed by extensive demonstrated leadership, heart, and nearly 25 years of practical experience building, growing, and leading social impact initiatives, organizations, and leaders.
Prior to Ascend Advisory, Sara served as CEO of VidaNyx, a social enterprise created initially to serve victims of child abuse to improve multidisciplinary collaboration using secure cloud video technology, after serving as President and CEO of the Omaha Community Foundation. At VidaNyx, Sara built the start-up team after matching leading social impact technologists with Project Harmony and diversified product and customer portfolios to revolutionize and grow video collaboration technology for evidentiary and health records - accelerating justice and healing for hundreds of thousands of individuals across all 50 states and Puerto Rico.
As President and CEO of the Omaha Community Foundation, Sara led a team to grow to 1,800+ accounts and $1.2 billion in assets (15th in the nation), supporting hundreds of millions of philanthropic investments in the community annually. She and her leadership team architected the creation of OMAHA GIVES! - delivering $50 million in giving from tens of thousands of donors - and LandscapeOmaha with 38 social impact indicators. Sara also led her team to launch an impact investing program for local businesses while growing programs supporting 1,200+ nonprofits and sponsoring programs supporting 100 Chartered Advisors in Philanthropy.
Sara holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and a Masters in Business Administration from the University of Chicago. Sara and her husband Matt are the proud parents of three children.