From Treasury to Tech

CMU alumna Breanna Zwart champions change and equity while striving to create a better world for all

“Service” is the powerful legacy that Carnegie Mellon University alumna Breanna Zwart carries with her, passed down by her grandparents. They taught her by their example not only to work hard but to lift up others, too.

That legacy has defined Breanna’s life both personally and professionally, inspiring her to make an impact in government and the tech industry as well as her community.

Breanna’s grandparents, Dr. Robert Matthews and Ardelle Matthews, were teachers. Both were raised on farms and the first in their families to attend college.

“My grandmother picked cotton as a child,” Breanna says. “They both fought for a better life.” Her grandmother was the first in her small, rural community to go to college. During those years, Ardelle traveled home to talk about her experiences and to encourage other young people in her hometown to attend college as well. Breanna’s grandparents spent their lives serving generations of students and working for racial justice. Those lessons had a significant impact on Breanna.

Breanna, in turn, has made a significant impact for women and girls, across a variety of arenas.

A Tartan twice over, Breanna earned a bachelor’s degree in the interdisciplinary BXA program in 2006 from Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences and a master’s degree in public policy and management in 2008 from Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy.

As you might expect with a newly minted policy degree in hand, Breanna gravitated toward government service.

In 2011, she landed as a political appointee in the U.S. Department of the Treasury (USDT) during the Obama administration, in the midst of the economic crisis.

“It was really all hands on deck,” Breanna says. She pitched in to help where she was needed. At the same time, Breanna had an interest in gender issues. She wanted to make the world more just, and she shared that interest with a manager at the USDT. That person told Breanna the USDT needed to do more work around gender equity and encouraged her to take on the issue.

It was an instance of Breanna’s passion matching the opportunity.

During her time at the USDT, Breanna managed the gender and multilateral financial institutions portfolios and advised Secretaries Timothy Geithner and Jacob Lew on related policy issues. She also worked with the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation.

“We looked at how resources and funding are being distributed, what equity looks like there,” Breanna says.

Though her work was satisfying, presidential appointments have a built-in shelf life. At the end of her tenure, Breanna shifted into the private sector. In 2013, she accepted a job as the operations lead for global public policy at Google. Soon after, she took on the role of managing emerging markets for Google’s “Next Billion Users” initiative.

A Career Focused on Equity

In a career path that has spanned both government and tech, the through-line is equity. Whether she is focused on gender economics or human rights, Breanna continues to work toward a better world.

As part of the Google team, Breanna brokered deals to build high-speed internet infrastructure in emerging markets. That experience — working with engineers, regulators and heads of state to achieve the goal — was both challenging and rewarding. Her work in Liberia, in particular, constitutes one of Breanna’s proudest professional accomplishments.

“USAID (the U.S. Agency for International Development) approached us with the idea that they wanted Google to do some digital reconstruction in West Africa,” Breanna says. Her team was able to create strategic relationships in Monrovia, Liberia, that enabled them to lay down fiber there.

“It felt great because we were providing more equitable access, but it wasn’t charity. It was a business collaboration, and it was successful,” Breanna says. President Biden recently cited their work with USAID as a model of effective public-private partnerships.

Breanna moved from Google to YouTube. As a strategic partnership manager at YouTube Social Impact, Breanna developed partnerships with non-governmental organizations like UNICEF, Doctors Without Borders and the Malala Fund to support human rights defenders.

“It was interesting and really fun work because it had social impact, but we made a difference in a way distinct from the work done through a foundation. We weren’t giving out grants or money,” Breanna says. “Instead, we were teaching people how to use technology to build community. We provided the tools and the platform, and we taught them how to become effective digital storytellers to tell their own stories.”

In partnership with the Malala Fund, Breanna worked on a campaign to support girls’ education in India. The effort involved collaboration with various public figures to help them craft messages, similar to short public service announcements, in their own style, on their own channels, in their own words.

Breanna’s commitment to equity, particularly for women and girls, extends outside her professional roles. Since 2015, she has served on San Francisco’s Commission on the Status of Women (COSW); She was elected president in 2019.

“It’s one of the strongest and most innovative commissions in the country,” Breanna says. COSW tackles a broad range of issues affecting women and nonbinary people including violence prevention, gender equality in the workplace, financial empowerment, and equal representation on public decision-making bodies.

In 2021, Breanna became a senior director at Microsoft Cloud for Industry. Her proudest professional accomplishment came recently. Breanna received a thank you note from a member of her team who was leaving. The person thanked Breanna for creating a culture where the person could be their full self and feel like they belonged.

“That’s the type of culture I strive to create for everyone,” Breanna explained. “To have it be affirmed meant a lot.”

Navigating an Unconventional Career Path

Her years at Heinz College prepared Breanna well for the various spheres in which she operates.

“I didn’t have a traditional career ladder or planned path,” Breanna says. “It’s because of the core skills I learned at Heinz that I was able to chart my own journey.”

Breanna cites James M. Walton Professor Ph.D. in Economics Linda Babcock, Trustees Professor of Management Science and Healthcare Informatics Rema Padman and H. John Heinz III University Professor of Economics Lowell Taylor as teaching her the skills she uses every day such as negotiation, economics, stats and data systems.

One professor, in particular, changed the course of her career.

“All roads lead back to Silvia,” Breanna says, referring to Teaching Professor of International Relations and Politics Silvia Borzutzky. “I met her during my freshman year at CMU. She has been a mentor, a sponsor and an advocate ever since.”

It was Borzutzky who first suggested Breanna consider the Public Policy and International Affairs summer fellowship during her undergraduate years. Breanna was accepted to the program at Princeton University and got hooked on public policy while participating in the fellowship. During both her undergraduate and graduate studies, Breanna was a teaching assistant in several of Borzutzky’s classes. Borzutzky, whose courses focus on gender inequality, poverty, human rights, race and international policies and politics, provided the academic underpinning that allowed Breanna to create a career that tackles those big issues in government, tech and her community.

“I thought I was always going to work in government, because that’s where you address those big, hairy problems,” Breanna says. “I thought that’s where I needed to be to affect change. What I realized later is that there’s no one way to do things, and I could make a difference in the tech industry. The foundation I built at Heinz enabled me to do that. Ultimately, it all really goes back to the idea of service.”

And for Breanna, service goes back to the example set by her grandparents. They taught her to work for equity for all people.

“They showed me how to lift up others, how to bring the community together, and to think about what needs to happen for Black and brown people — and for everyone — to actually be equal,” Breanna says. “Their example has continued to drive me to live up to their ideals of what this world should be.”