Maya Sharfi is a creative agent of change, a do-er, and a big-picture thinker. She founded Build Yourself to help women move past the obstacles that hold them back in the workplace and to make those workplaces better places for women's talent. Maya’s programs have helped companies increase the promotion of women by 2-3 times and enlist leaders of all genders in actively building strong female leadership pipelines.

Maya is a trained women’s empowerment facilitator and has worked on women’s advocacy for over fifteen years. She’s run a research effort on women in social impact design for the Harvard Business School, is a founding member of the Equity Roundtable at the Boston Society of Architects, and was named as one of Impact Design Hub’s Social Impact Design 40 under 40.

Maya has spoken extensively across the country, including at the Association of Community Designers and A Better World by Design, as well as the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, and the University of Pennsylvania. Maya received degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and Brown University. Her writings on issues of equity in design have been published in the Christian Science Monitor and GOOD.