ASCETA is a strategic design consultancy committed to scaling inclusivity and collaboratively creating our equitable future. Since its founding in 2008, ASCETA reimagines how people organize, make decisions and work together to meet the complex needs of our time through strategic design facilitation, social venture management, and exceptional learning experiences to emergent leaders seeking adaptive change.

At ASCETA, Managing Director and Lead Consultant Sophia Tzeng (she/her) brings together teams who are passionate about social impact, design, systems change, and empathy for human experience.

A former attorney, entrepreneur and executive, Sophia practiced international corporate litigation at Cleary Gottlieb before founding and selling a PR and events-based company in Manhattan serving global industry leaders and leading nonprofits through founder transitions. In 2017, Sophia served as Interim Executive Director of Innovation Law Lab, recognized by the Financial Times as Legal Innovator of the Year during her tenure, and in 2020, as the first CEO of Oregon Consumer Justice.

Sophia has served as a professor for the University of Portland’s Pamplin School of Business and for the Pacific Northwest College of Art’s graduate program in Collaborative Design, teaching design thinking, entrepreneurship, social venture management, leadership, strategy, corporate social responsibility and innovation. She has also regularly lectured for WVDO’s Nonprofit Executive Leadership Academy. A graduate of Harvard College and Columbia Law School, Sophia has served as President and member of the Board of Directors of PERIOD. The Menstrual Movement and on the Boards of Directors of the DPI Group, Campfire Columbia, and the Oregon Environmental Council. She served as a longtime Partner with Social Venture Partners Portland.

Sophia’s lived experience as an American-born, Hoosier-reared daughter of Asian immigrants, a 24th generation Hakka Chinese from Taiwan, and a single working mother with sole custody rearing three daughters in New York and Oregon inspires and informs her work to ensure the inclusion of the least heard in every system, and the co-creation of new tools, solutions and stories to address inequity and improve our collective future.