![HL](https://rootsofprogress.org/u/2024/05/hl.jpg)
Heike Larson
VP of Programs
Heike is an executive with 25+ years of strategy, product development, talent development, sales and marketing experience across industries. She honed her business skills in 8 years at global consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where she also led recruiting of top talent for the Chicago and German offices. After getting her pilot’s license, she joined Cirrus Aircraft as a flying sales person and quickly took over the Western US sales team for the fast-growing company. In the decade prior to joining ROP, Heike became immersed in the challenge of bringing better education to US children, leading the growth of a network of Montessori schools across the US, and then heading up the team of writers and storytellers that establishing ed-tech company Mystery Science as the leading K-5 science curriculum in the US. Growing up in divided Germany, during her frequent visits to the impoverished East, Heike experienced how progress and abundance are not guaranteed; she is excited to create a new generation of intellectual entrepreneurs to build a flourishing progress movement.