Public Affairs Career Lecture Series: Margaret Busse

Margaret Woolley Busse recently moved to Utah after living in the Boston area for 20 years. She is currently a strategic advisor to a large, Utah-based humanitarian organization. Prior to this, Margaret served for several years as the Associate Director of the Social Enterprise Initiative at Harvard Business School, where she worked to connect and engage alumni who are involved in social enterprise careers in order to drive value to their careers and to social enterprise at large. Passionate about bringing people together around common sense public policy solutions, Ms. Busse pursued a 2018 bid for the State Senate in Massachusetts, where she ran as a Republican against the Democratic incumbent, an election that she ultimately lost, but was named one of six women to watch in Massachusetts politics by WGBH.
Before her work at HBS, Margaret played a key role in governing the town where she resided in Acton, Massachusetts. She served as the chairwoman of both the Acton Finance Committee and the Acton 2020 master plan committee. Ms. Busse’s career has also included working as a strategy consultant to non-profit organizations at the Bridgespan Group as well as spending several years at the U.S. Treasury Department. Ms. Busse holds a MBA from Harvard University, a Master’s Degree in Public Policy from Brigham Young University, and a Bachelor’s Degree in both Public Policy and Economics from Brigham Young University, where she graduated cum laude and with university honors. Ms. Busse and her husband, Franz, have five children, ages 6 to 16, and love traveling, hiking, and skiing together.