World Savvy is thrilled to welcome the latest addition to our team: Joy DeMarais-Lanz, our new Chief Operating Officer (COO)! In the midst of World Savvy’s ambitious goals for growing our reach and impact across the country, the COO is responsible for supporting the internal scaling of the organization, leading the executive management team, and developing a performance culture throughout the organization.
Prior to joining World Savvy, Joy served as an Executive Director at Synergos, an Association Management Company where she led a portfolio of 13 association and not-for-profit clients. Before her tenure at Synergos, Joy held leadership positions at HOBY (Hugh O’Brian Youth Leadership), the National Youth Leadership Council, and three higher education institutions. Praised for her commitment to mentorship, Joy invests her time and energy in nurturing talent, providing guidance, and empowering others.
We recently got to sit down with Joy and hear more about her story. Follow along with us to learn more about her, her journey to World Savvy, and her connection to our mission to educate and engage youth to learn, work, and thrive as responsible global citizens.
What was your journey with school/education like, and how has it led you to the desire to reimagine education with World Savvy?
In school, I was a bit of an overachiever and very involved—especially because I had educators willing to take some risks and engage me in unique ways. This is how I first began to engage in reimagining what education could be. I attended a school that was initially fairly traditional; however, during my junior and senior years, the school started a “school within a school” model. It was all thematic units and experiential education, combining math, science, social studies, and English, and it was team-taught. I absolutely loved it. This model was funded by the Blandin Foundation, from the Center for School Change. I was so engaged, and even began accompanying the teacher team to workshops at the Center for School Change and talking about young people’s role in school change—how young people needed to have a voice and a seat at the table, something closely aligned with World Savvy’s values and approach. That, combined with being involved in many student organizations, career and technical education, and doing advocacy and training other young people about how to get involved—I was very active even as a student in reimagining what education could be.
After high school, I attended college at St. Catherine University, where I learned the language of social justice and social change, a rich tradition at the school. I also started interning, first at the Center for School Change and then at the National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC), learning the language of service learning and experiential education. That led to me writing a federal grant that resulted in a full-time job at NYLC during my senior year of college. I started there as the Director of Youth and Strategic Initiatives while still a student, after which I transitioned into a full-time role.
If it weren’t for my high school teachers who were willing to take a risk and do some innovative, collaborative teaching and learning, I wouldn’t be in the career that I’m in today. I have immense gratitude for that group of teachers for being risk-takers. Because they were willing to think about teaching and learning differently, it had a direct impact on my life and my career—and my journey to World Savvy.
Could you tell us more about the rest of your career that has led you to this point—to joining the World Savvy team?
At NYLC, I was doing a lot of work training teachers and young people how to work together through youth-adult partnerships and service learning, school change work, and opening space for youth to serve on boards. I then decided that I wanted to be an educator myself. So I left NYLC for graduate school and, afterward, I went into higher education for eleven years, teaching at three different institutions. During that time, I really dug into teaching methodology, and I stayed connected to K-12 education—even though I was in higher education—through some training and consulting, including with the Department of Education. This work led me to Anoka-Ramsey Community College, where I launched the service learning program there.
After that, in the role I’m transitioning out of at Synergos, I’ve now worked in Association Management for ten years. I wanted to be an Executive Director of a nonprofit, and I saw this role that looked so similar—and in the process learned that there was this whole world of association management that I hadn’t known existed. So for the last ten years, I’ve worked with professional societies and trade associations as their fractional Executive Director, helping them lead the charge around strategic plans, governance, and operationalizing their goals.
Recently though, I’ve been craving a return to my roots in the school change world and working with young people. Especially now as a mother—my kids are currently in the Anoka-Hennepin school district, which is the largest school district in Minnesota—and helping my middle school student navigate this period of their education, I realized I wanted to be working with change agents who are committed to reimagining education. I want to play some role in that again with World Savvy.
It’s clear that the mission of World Savvy resonates deeply with you. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
The goal of educating for global competence—preparing students with the skills, attitudes, and behaviors necessary to thrive in an ever-changing and complex world—and especially through the lens of preparing young for jobs that don’t yet exist, is so important. The ability to learn, and unlearn, and relearn is so critical in our current economy, and our education system is just not set up to do that. It is critical that we, as stakeholders in education, ask questions and push the system to start thinking about the imperative of preparing young people differently.
I’m so excited to join the World Savvy team as the new COO. I’m excited to work with people who I think are smarter than I am—that will make me smarter. Throughout the entire process, I’ve been so impressed by everybody, and so impressed by the mission and the values of the organization—especially the commitment to recognizing that we are all human, that we focus on collaboration, and that not only what we do but how we do it matters. The idea how we communicate with one another, how we make decisions, and how we serve in leadership is just as important as what we achieve, I am very aligned with. I’m excited to be a sponge, to absorb and learn, but also to contribute in this type of professional community that is in some ways modeling what we hope World Savvy’s work in schools will yield for young people.
As a final question, a fun one: tell us a bit about yourself outside of work.
I have a 13-year-old, and then I have a bonus daughter who is 24 and another who is 27, and I am a bonus grandma to my 27-year-old’s 5-year-old. I also have fourteen nieces and nephews! So I spend a lot of time with my family—I just love hanging out with them, especially as my nieces and nephews are getting older and starting their lives. It’s so fun to see where they are going. I also love to travel. My husband for many years had a job with Delta, so we had many adventures flying standby. We love to see new places, see new things, and expose ourselves to new ideas. I’m also a reader, and my guilty pleasure is binge-watching TV—which I used to feel guilty about, but not anymore! I feel I have fairly typical hobbies, but the throughline is that I just love learning about people, love learning about different ideas—whether through travel, relationships, or reading—I just love consistently exposing myself to new things.
Thank you, Joy. We are so thrilled you’ve joined the World Savvy team!
