Dr. Jillian Coppley

Jillian Coppley is a visionary leader with extensive expertise in driving organizational excellence and positive impact while fostering inclusive, strengths-based cultures. Jillian serves as President and Chief Products, Programs, and Services Officer at the VIA Institute on Character and has done so since leading Mayerson Academy to merge with VIA in June of 2023. She is passionately dedicated to VIA’s internal organizational development efforts and leading the organization to reimagine the architecture for VIA’s products, programs, services. Her strategic leadership has delivered documented impact of new programs and forged new partnerships with prestigious clients nationally and internationally.

Jillian's tenure at Mayerson Academy, where she served as President and CEO, included the successful reinvention of the organization. She recruited and led the team to expand the Academy's client base both nationally and internationally, developed innovative, research-based programs, and led the organization to secure its largest philanthropic and contract awards. Her efforts transformed Mayerson Academy into a thought leader in character strengths application, with speaking engagements and partnerships extending to China, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and Hong Kong.

Before joining Mayerson Academy, Jillian held leadership roles in higher education, public television. K-12 professional learning services, and philanthropy. As Vice President of Organizational Learning and Innovation at KnowledgeWorks, she led the development of a highly regarded and internationally distributed future trends publication, consulted with hundreds of organizations to construct future-oriented organizational visions and strategies, and created a vibrant online teacher-to-teacher learning community. She also founded the Institute for Creative Collaboration at KnowledgeWorks, promoting systems thinking and future oriented thinking and planning for leading organizations across the education sector. In her earlier roles, Jillian led teams to create widely distributed multimedia educational products and services, and received national recognition for the design and implementation of an organizational learning system.

Jillian is an award-winning educator and holds a Doctor of Education in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Cincinnati, a Bachelor of Science in Design from the University of Cincinnati, graduating with distinction in both instances. Her academic excellence is complemented by numerous authored publications, profiles of her work, and hundreds of invited speaking engagements for audiences from 100 to 10,000 on innovation, leadership, and the application of character science.

Jillian’s signature character strengths are Creativity, Perseverance, Love of Learning, Appreciation of Beauty and Excellence and Honesty.