As senior vice president, work-based learning, Laura Love leads Strada’s work-based learning agenda, which focuses on paid internships and apprenticeships that help students connect their education to their career aspirations. Love’s work emphasizes ways to scale paid, quality work-based learning experiences across the United States and focuses on the research, policies, and practices needed on a national level to achieve systems change.

Before joining Strada in May 2024, Love served as a partner at Grads of Life, an initiative of the national workforce development nonprofit organization Year Up, where she worked to advise large employers on inclusive talent strategies.

Love spent 10 years at Year Up and Grads of Life, its consultancy arm. In 2014, Love helped launch Grads of Life as a national communications campaign with the Ad Council, focused on changing public narratives about young people who are neither enrolled in school nor participating in the labor market. Following the campaign, Love played a key role in leading Grads of Life’s strategic growth and impact, supporting the creation of a consulting practice, and developing a research and thought leadership strategy. Earlier in her tenure at Year Up, Love developed a blueprint for program expansion, overseeing the launch of Year Up’s first employer-based training model in partnership with multinational toy maker Hasbro.

Love also led international expansion projects for global nongovernmental organization Ashoka, based in Singapore. She connected social entrepreneurs with seed funding, built strategic partnerships with business leaders, philanthropic entities, and nongovernmental organizations, and helped secure support to expand the organization’s presence into Malaysia.

Love holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Oxford’s Said Business School and a Bachelor of Arts in international studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She lives in Baltimore with her husband, son, and Bernese mountain dog.