Tegan Acton

Raised downstate from Silicon Valley in San Luis Obispo, Tegan Acton graduated from the University of California Santa Barbara in 1997. She had a stint at Yahoo! and later worked at Sundance Institute for nearly nine years during her 20s and early 30s, where she, in her words, thoroughly “drank the Kool-Aid” about the power of storytelling and its ability to generate empathy. Her work at the celebrated nonprofit years ago continues to inform her giving today. She also credits her “backpacking hippie” parents who met at a youth hostel in Ghana and traveled all over West Africa. Acton’s parents even plucked her out of fourth grade for a year while the whole family backpacked through Southeast Asia.