Ruthe Farmer

Ruthe Farmer BA ’92, founder of the Last Mile Education Fund, was featured in the New York Times in April 2023 in an article titled “For Lower-Income Students, Big Tech Internships Can Be Hard to Get.”

Ruthe Farmer BA ’92 is CEO and founder of Last Mile Education Fund, which was awarded the Gold Medal for Product Innovation at the first-ever Anthem Awards Social Impact Celebration. Farmer herself received the Silver Medal for Leader of the Year in Responsible Technology. In Last Mile’s first year of operation, the fund distributed more than $300,000 to 350 low-income women pursuing computer science education. In 2021, Last Mile launched a $3 million fund for women and nonbinary individuals.

Ruthe Farmer BA ’92 was named a Schmidt Futures Innovation Fellow in October 2021. She is the founder and CEO of the Last Mile Education Fund, which supports degree completion for low-income students in tech and engineering. Farmer has been a leader in promoting inclusion in tech for more than 20 years, working with CSforAll, the National Center for Women and Information Technology, and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

Ruthe Farmer BA ’92 lives near Boulder, Colorado. She is CEO and founder of the Last Mile Education Fund, a national nonprofit focused on degree attainment for low-income tech and engineering students. Launched in January 2020, Last Mile has raised more than $5 million to support striving students through just-in-time financial and social support and was named a finalist for the $40 Million Equality Can’t Wait Challenge. Farmer was named a Schmidt Futures Innovation Fellow in March 2021. 

Ruthe Farmer BA ’92 was recently featured in the STEMiverse Australia podcast regarding her work on diversity and inclusion in technology. 

Ruthe Farmer BA ’92, who previously led tech inclusion initiatives in the Obama White House, is now chief evangelist at CSforALL.org, a nonprofit that serves as a national hub to help all students in grades K-12 achieve computer science literacy as part of their educational experience. She travels extensively for work and fun, and met with fellow Munich program alumna Lori Larsen BA ’92 in Brussels in December.

Ruthe Farmer BA ’92 gave a talk titled Computer Science for All at a TEDx conference in winter 2017. Farmer has been working for diversity and inclusion in the tech and engineering world for many years. She is responsible for the creation and subsequent scaling up of multiple national programs such as LEGO Robotics for Girl Scouts, NCWIT Aspirations in Computing, and the AspireIT computing outreach program, among others.