Teresa Y. Hodge

Teresa Y. Hodge, President of Mission: Launch, is an inspirational social entrepreneur and consultant. She is skilled at providing a clear vision for criminal justice reform and economic mobility for underserved populations. In June 2021, she was named one of the 50 over 50 Women by Forbes on their inaugural list for her innovative approach to criminal justice reform. She is the recipient of a Harvard Kennedy School Carr Center for Human Rights Policy Technology and Human Rights Fellows 2019-2020, where she co-authored the position paper “Mass Incarceration and The Future: An Urgent Need to Address the Human Rights Implications of Criminal Background Checks and the Future of Artificial Intelligence” with her daughter and business partner Laurin Hodge Leonard.

Chairwoman for the independent Board of Advisors for Aventiv Technologies, Inc. She co-founded and served as the initial CEO for R3 Score Technologies, Inc., the company that offers a modernized criminal background report. She navigated the company through Techstars Impact 2019, Echoing Green 2018-2020, and was one of eight of the inaugural cohort members of New Profit’s Unlocked Futures accelerator (a partnership between Grammy Award-winning singer John Legend and Bank of America). She is a 2016-2017 Open Society Soros Justice Advocacy Fellow, and it was under this fellowship that she authored a position paper, “Unlock Inclusion: A Pathway of Digital Inclusion for People Living with Criminal Records.”

Teresa has testified before Congress, presented twice at SXSW (2016 and 2017), and is a 2017 Dewey Winburne SXSW Community Service Award recipient. Teresa’s TEDx talk “We’ve Made Coming Home Too Hard” highlights the impact of personal bias and social stigma on formerly incarcerated people and points to why recidivism rates are so high in America.