Abby is a native of Auburn, AL, attended Vanderbilt for her Bachelor’s degree and received her MBA and Master’s in Counseling from UAB. After leading fundraising teams at UAB, Harvard, University of Nevada Las Vegas, and UC Berkeley, she moved back to Birmingham in 2016 to launch and lead Innovate Birmingham, a city-wide collaborative initiative and tech workforce development program. There she worked to grow a strong talent pipeline for Birmingham and now she works the flipside of that coin to recruit great talent to Birmingham. Abby is the Senior Director of Birmingham for Venture For America, an entrepreneurial fellowship program bringing talented young people to the city who are interested in growing local startups and a vibrant emerging city. She has recruited Birmingham’s largest class of VFA Fellows and retained over 60% of the Fellows who have moved to Birmingham since VFA’s start here in 2015.
Abby was part of the inaugural cohort from Birmingham to attend Harvard Business School’s Young American Leaders Program (YALP) in 2018, was a member of the 2020 Leadership Birmingham Class, and was a 2020 Top 40 Under 40. Abby and her husband, Blake Russell, have two boys, ages 9 and 13.