Staff Coach

Cameron Skinner (he/him), Professional Certified Global Coach

m.a. international education, nyu steinhardt (paul d. coverdell fellow); b.a. english, Tufts University (MacJannet scholar)

Cameron coaches students, educators, school leaders, and founders — people who carry responsibility for others’ learning and rarely get the time or space to reflect on their own thinking and development. He came to coaching from his work in education, after fifteen years of teaching, leading, and innovating in schools and education organizations on four continents.

Cameron began his career as a Peace Corps ESL teacher in Rwanda, where he taught over 400 secondary students and, with USAID and the Education Development Center, built a community library that brought hundreds of readers into a district that had none — recruiting the officials, business owners, and educators who funded and ran it, and making the case in Kinyarwanda. He went on to lead experiential courses for Where There Be Dragons in Rwanda and Senegal, direct scholarship programs for young women in Senegal as Associate Director of Friends of Guéoul, and serve as CEO of EKP Innovations, an education content company in Cambridge. He then spent four years at TASIS Portugal, teaching elementary school and later coordinating Singapore Math across PreK–8. In 2021 he founded Penhammer, where he now runs small-group academic programs in Portugal and consults for international families and education organizations.

Cameron works from what the evidence supports and what the client responds to, rather than from a framework applied for its own sake. Much of his work is helping clients uncover the layers that live beneath — the assumptions, histories, and inherited expectations that shape one’s perceptions, beliefs, and decisions. His clients tend to be in transition or in unfamiliar spaces: new countries, new roles, new institutions they are being asked to run before they feel ready.

When he isn’t teaching, coaching, or consulting, Cameron is usually spending time with his wife and kids, hitting the gym, reading essays and articles, or hunting down something worth the detour like a live jazz concert or art exhibit. He lives in Portugal with his family.