Innovative educational approaches have always been a mission for Mindy Bingham. Over the years as a part-time college professor, seminar leader for educators, author, publisher, nonprofit executive director and community activist, Mindy has dedicated herself to improving education. A sought-after speaker and thinker on educational reform issues in the area of adolescent motivation, dropout prevention and gender equity, Mindy has made a major contribution to education over the last 30 years, the most recent being her dedication to institute a course in middle school or high school that provides the structure to help all students develop successful life plans. Her grassroots approach has earned her several honors including the south coast Business Network's Entrenpreneur of the Year in 1998.
 Mindy’s journey as an educational activist and publisher began in Santa Barbara, Calif. where she worked as the executive director for the Girls Club of Santa Barbara (now Girls Incorporated) from 1973 to 1989. Though running one of the largest Girls Clubs in the United States was both
personally and professionally fulfilling for Mindy, she knew there had to be a way to reach more girls with the messages
so desperately needed. By packaging this information into book form and disseminate them throughout the country
thousands of girls could be served, rather than the few hundred in Santa Barbara. So began the nonprofit publishing company, Advocacy Press (1983 to 1990).
With her entrepreneurial instincts in overdrive, Mindy and her team at the Girls Club launched Advocacy Press’ first book, Choices: A Teen Woman’s Journal for Self-awareness and Personal Planning in 1983. The book sold 500,000 copies and is credited as one of the seminal works impacting the lives and goals of hundreds of thousands of girls. Choices, and the male version, Challenges, led the gender equity movement in the 1980’s by providing a classroom curriculum for students that focused on the issues that prevented young women from succeeding. Though a nationally acclaimed curriculum, its one major flaw was that most schools could not see where it
fit in their course work and relegated it to special classes and populations. This was frustrating for educators who knew that these issues were important for all students, so Mindy endeavored to alleviate this frustration and make the curriculum more relevant to
schools around the country by getting buy in from the state gender equity specialists.
In 1987 Mindy and her team of dedicated staff and volunteers at Advocacy Press
hosted a small meeting where the national leaders of girls’ organizations, women’s
service organizations and state educational equity coordinators met to brainstorm the
direction the gender equity movement must take. At this conference the incoming
national president of the American Association of University Women (AAUW), Sarah
Harder, committed to making girls’ issues her organization’s focus during the 1990’s.
The AAUW went on to launch its widely successful campaign to promote educational
equity for girls. The gender equity movement gained traction and soon the media,
educators and parents were focusing on how to help girls become economically selfsufficient.
Since then girls and young women have gotten the message and great
societal strides have been made. For instance, when the first edition of Choices was
published in 1983, 21.7% of doctors and 21.5% of lawyers were women. Today, only
twenty years later, 47.9% of students in medical school are women, and 49% of
students in law school are women
educators and parents were focusing on how to help girls become economically selfsufficient.
Deciding it was time to create her own path, Mindy
retired after 16 years with the Girls Club and set off to
found Academic Innovations, in 1990. With just a 10 x 10
home office and her Santa Barbara garage, Mindy
launched her most ambitious endeavor to date: a series
of standards-based, interdisciplinary curriculum of which
the anchor for an innovative approach to education is
Career Choices: A Guide for Teens and Young
Adults Who Am I? What Do I Want? How Do I Get It?
(Academic Innovations, 1990). The launch of this book
allowed Mindy to pursue a life-long dream to create a
curriculum that high schools could use that would
motivate young people to stay in school and prepare
themselves for a career and a satisfying life.
The Career Choices curriculum is adopted by nearly 500 schools annually, and since 1990, over 5,000 schools and 2 million students have used it. Nationally acclaimed over the years by a variety of educational entities, in July 2000, the United States Department of Education awarded the Career Choices series its coveted “promising” citation as a curriculum that works along with a Best Practices citation from the U.S.
Department of Labor.
Few individuals have successfully navigated the complexities of the textbook
publishing field. It takes at least two years for a start-up to even consider breaking
even, plus a tremendous marketing effort and considerable capital to break into this
market. Yet Mindy’s passion and drive saw her through those perilous first years when
her life savings, a small inheritance and many life-long investments dwindled to nearly
zero. By April of 1992, Academic Innovations turned the corner into the black and
today is a successful company with a solid bottom line that provides quality
employment to a team of dedicated staff and consultants. “I’m blessed to be able to
work in a field I love and make a difference in people’s lives at the same time,”
Bingham says. “I’m living the dream that I write about in my books.”
A true self-publisher with a diversity of books on her resume, Mindy has authored or
co-authored 17 titles. These award-winning books have sold well over 2 million copies
in the States and abroad. Four of these are children’s picture books that enabled her to
publish full-color, hard-cover titles and learn the ins and outs of the foreign rights
market. Mindy also co-authored a step-by-step guide to writing a book (Is There a
Book Inside You?) and co-founded (with Para Publshing’s Dan Poynter) a two-day selfpublishing
workshop in 1984 that still educates would-be publishers today.
Mindy’s solid and steady endorsement of self-publishing comes from years of success
doing it and a taste of what can happen when authors give outside publishers their
books. In 1995, traditional publishing giant Penguin Group USA showed interest in
Mindy’s self-esteem and self-reliance building book Things Will Be Different for My
Daughter. Always ambitious to try new things, Mindy and her co-author placed their
book in Penguin’s care and though it was met with rave reviews, it failed to generate
the sales numbers like those of her self-published titles. With the experience leaving
much to be desired, Mindy returned to her own writing and marketing efforts, resolving
to publish her own books from then on.
Mindy has spent the last few years writing web-based curriculum and designing computer software to enhance her curricula; upgrading the Career Choices curriculum; and rewriting and expanding the college text, Career Choices and Changes. As a volunteer she actively supports the efforts of the Get Focused...Stay Focused!® Initiative of Santa Barbara City College and the Freshman Transition Initiative of the George Washington University.
She remains passionate about helping young people become economically self-sufficient. Working on reform efforts for secondary and post-secondary education, she continues to write and speak about issues that impact young people's opportunities to live the American dream. Her expertise in organizational development along with her keen business sense and bottom-line thinking, allows her to provide valuable and innovative support to fledgling efforts aimed at improving education across our country.
Mindy lives in Montecito, California with her husband, Jim Comiskey. Her daughter, Wendy, a graduate of the University of Southern California School of Business, is the Vice President in charge of Professional Development and Sales for Academic Innovations. Wendy and Tanja Easson, Vice President of Operations, Curriculum, and Technical Support, are now responsible for the day-to-day running of Academic Innovations, giving Mindy the flexibility to focus her energy and expertise as a volunteer "educational activist" and developer of resources in the area of high school and college reform.
Read how Mindy discovered her passion for helping teenagers prepare for self-sufficient
futures.
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Mindy Bingham 