Born in Seattle, raised in Waco (Texas), grown up in Berkeley (California), and rooted in East and North Oakland (“The Town”), Milan Drake calls all these places home—they shape how he leads, designs, and thinks. Guided by the belief that real transformation takes more working and less talking, Milan creates work that bridges education, design, and community.

As the Community Design Lead at Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (aka The d.school), Milan co-teaches Print on Purpose, a course blending design, social justice, and printmaking. 

He is the creator of mixTAPE x maniFESTO, a world-renowned workshop that connects music, Black Thought, cultural production, and design thinking. Milan and this work have traveled the globe, co-producing over 1,000 mixtape artifacts with community members worldwide.

With over 25 years of experience, Milan leads programs and initiatives that center the well-being of historically excluded communities. His career moves across higher education, social enterprise, corporate America, and design thinking firms, where he consistently amplifies voices that are too often unheard. Milan’s work remains rooted in Black pedagogies and culture as a practice for meaningful change.

Milan earned a BS in Social Welfare from UC Berkeley as a non-traditional/transfer student-parent and recently attained his MA in Education from Stanford University, Graduate School of Education.