Hi, I'm Ammy, your Educational Concierge. From wondering to building, together.

My journey

How I got here

1. 01

   A new country, a new language

   I arrived in the U.S. from Colombia at fifteen without a word of English. The language barrier made school lonely and hard, and some teachers underestimated what I could do. Those early setbacks built the resilience I lean on to this day.

2. 02

   Fifteen years in the classroom

   I graduated from Northeastern University in 2005 with a degree in political science and public administration, and became a high school civics teacher. I also earned my master's in Curriculum and Design from UMass Boston. Teaching young people to question, research and argue their ideas has been at the heart of everything since.

3. 03

   A lesson that became a business

   My students were researching food deserts — neighborhoods with little access to healthy food. Looking at their findings made me think of my own community. I had seen juice bars everywhere I traveled, but not where I lived. So I decided to open one myself, with no experience in food service.

4. 04

   Building Juicygreens

   My husband and I invested our personal savings, learned how to build a business plan together, and I was part of the first I FUND WOMEN crowdfunding campaign here in Boston. The first shop opened in Jamaica Plain in 2017. We scaled it from one to eight locations and into a 7-digit revenue, with multiple revenue sources: corporate catering and wholesale. We signed our second operational agreement at Northeastern University — students now get to enjoy some of the best smoothies inside the Curry Student Center.

5. 05

   Never done learning

   I came back to Northeastern hoping to mentor younger entrepreneurs, and the Women's Interdisciplinary Society of Entrepreneurship (WISE) gave me as much as I gave them. Now I mentor young entrepreneurs at Northeastern and Babson, and I built InnovatEd, an instructional design and workforce development agency.

6. 06

   My own educational concierge

   In the past two years, I've given myself space to learn. I designed my own learning journey around the skills I wanted to build — and the ones I was lacking. Another degree was not possible, so I became my own educational concierge and researched multiple courses that led me to LBAN Scaling Business at Stanford School of Business, design thinking at Stanford d.school, and now at Harvard, earning a certificate for educators in Teaching in Higher Education.

Read the full story in Northeastern Global News.