Biography
Professor, practitioner, writer and business owner at the intersection of social entrepreneurship, information and communication technologies and workforce development; Lani Fraizer champions cultivation of tech-savvy-leadership skills to create meaningful career opportunities for working generations.
As a Skoll World Forum Delegate and Global Ambassador for the Anita Borg Institute, Lani is social entrepreneurial at heart. Working primarily in corporate sector's education marketing services, start-up, academia and technology education in the last 20 years, she has transformed her passions into a portfolio career with emphasis on service to the community. Her passion for ICT-applied education has brought her to places like Seoul, Quebec, London, Oxford, Beijing, and many parts of the United States.
Lani's ecclectic career portfolio includes serving as Founder of Synergies in Sync's B Corporation consulting firm specializing in human capacity building and globally distributed learning communities. This work serves as a platform for changemaking education and Lani has created a vehicle especially suited for her integrated interests in technology, education, and workforce development. Because the social problems that her clients seek to end are always evolving, Dr. Fraizer believes that lifelong learning is a primary weapon against the cycle of social issues such as poverty, disease and intolerance that harm our world.
Her changemaking work is based on her lifelong research on human capacity building and doctoral research entitled, "21st century social changemakers and next-generation social entrepreneurs" chaired by Organizational Leadership Professor Dr. Farzin Madjidi. This work led to her most recent post-doctoral work which includes "Developing Lifelong Changemakers," a colorful white paper introducing the Lifelong Changemakers Framework based on the 2009 study on Ashoka Fellows from the education and workforce sectors. She's also a contributing author of "Campus Starter Kit for Faculty and Staff: Resources for developing social entrepreneurship education on your campus" recently published by Ashoka, and "ICT and social entrepreneurship: Implications of change making for the future ICT workforce", co-authored with Madjidi.
Integrated with her changemaking efforts at Synergies in Sync, Fraizer also serves in various external organizational leadership roles, and Assistant Professor at College of Continuing Education at California State University. She also guest lectures at Pepperdine University's Graduate School of Education and Psychology in topics related to the intersection of social entrepreneurship, personal leadership and learning technologies. Her most recent accomplishments include leading and supporting a global team in building international capacity to support education leaders, ministries of education, and government leaders across 13 regions and 78 countries worldwide to transform education via ICT as an accelerator.
Growing up in a household surrounded by computers and techie parents and siblings, Lani holds a special regard for the unique ways that technology touches lives and she especially enjoys instilling digital literacy in others. “One of the things I aspire to accomplish when I teach is to impart an overall excitement about technology and digital literacy—regardless of subject-matter. Technology can be a powerful catalyst for change for a better life and economic opportunity for students of any discipline, anywhere in the world.â€
She holds a Master of Science degree in Information Technology Management from Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College and has earned a doctoral degree with distinction in Educational Technology and Leadership from the Graduate School of Education and Psychology at Pepperdine University. Lani also holds a Master's Degree in Educational Technology Leadership from California State University East Bay; a Bachelor's Degree in Psychology from California State University Sacramento with emphasis in Computer Science and an Associate's Degree in Liberal Arts from American River College.
