Welcome to Advancing ALL Women!

Sarah Alter is the President and CEO of NextUp. She joined NextUp in 2017, and has wide-ranging executive leadership experience in the markets NextUp represents. Sarah has successfully expanded the scope of NextUp’s mission to include Advancing All Women, and has grown NextUp to be the largest non-profit of its type, with over 14,000 members representing over 900 organizations, 21 regions, and over 300 national and regional corporate partners. Over 50% of NextUp’s national corporate sponsors are on the Fortune or Global 500, and Sarah has built NextUp into an organization that spans industries from tech, to finance, to retail, to CPG. Additionally, she has focused NextUp on supporting women of color, building male allyship, the new generation coming into our workforce, and, more recently, how COVID-19 has impacted women in the workplace. She is a regular speaker at NRF, ShopTalk, National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS), and EnsembleIQ events such as Top Women in Convenience, Top Women in Grocery, and Top Women in Hardware. She was recognized by Crain’s Chicago Business as a Notable Woman Executive in 2020. She is an organizer of Chicago’s annual Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JRDF) Gala, which has raised millions of dollars for Type 1 diabetes. She also serves on the for-profit boards of the Illinois State Advisory Lottery Board and the Maverick Digital Advisory Board. She is a graduate of Northwestern University and has a Harvard MBA.