Dar Vanderbeck

Dar Vanderbeck is Vice President of the Aspen Global Leadership Network. In this role, she is focused on strengthening a growing international community of people and partners committed to lifelong, values-based leadership and bringing its impact to much larger scale and significance.

Dar is a community-minded leader and executive with deep experience in bringing innovation to major global organizations. Her vocational focus is transformation – how she imagine, innovate and create the structures and systems she need to bring about a just and vibrant world for all of us.

Prior to joining the Aspen Institute, Dar served as the first Chief Innovation Officer at CARE USA where she was responsible for driving the transformation and leading the creation of the 75-year-old organization’s global innovation strategy. Previously, she was Managing Director for Teach for America’s Innovation and Values-Based Leadership team, tasked with building TFA alumni cohorts across the country to help drive values-based innovation. Dar is also a founder of several organizations, most recently Canopy Collective, an organization with a mission to end and heal from racialized violence by building a transnational coalition of people advancing truth-telling and reparative justice in their countries. She co-founded Imperative, a technology platform to unlock purpose in the workplace, and has held positions at McKinsey & Company, and USAID, where she worked at the Office of Transition Initiatives in Afghanistan. Dar began her career in Kenya working with the grassroots organization MUHURI (Muslims for Human Rights) and co-founding the Roosevelt Campus Network, which sought to engage young people in policymaking. She has served on the Boards of MicroVest Holdings, CARE Social Ventures, Rhize and Chrysalis Ltd – Sri Lanka, and as an advisor for Impactive LLC, among others. She is also a death doula and a mentor for the Unreasonable Institute.

Dar comes from a large, multiracial, multinational family and grew up in New Jersey. She has lived in Lewiston, ME; Washington, DC; Atlanta, GA; Oakland, CA; Nairobi, Kenya; Bangkok, Thailand; Cairo, Egypt; and Kandahar, Afghanistan. Dar earned her B.A from Bates College in a self-designed interdisciplinary major called Political Economies in Transition. She is currently finishing a Masters of Divinity in Social Transformation from the Pacific School of Religion (PSR) in Berkeley, CA and her interreligious chaplaincy degree.