Benjamin Summers
Founder and Executive Director
The summer prior to starting high school, a club team trip to Brazil introduced Ben to their professional academy system, where he saw the athletic structure built around kids training at the highest level. He started dreaming of attending an academy like it himself, and with his own PreK-8 education built around independent inquiry, he started thinking ways to combine the two ideas. Little did he know at the time, but that idea would become the basis for what the Cardo Method has become today.
During his time as a club player, he won two state titles, was trained by elite coaches, and played with several future professionals. He also earned First Team All-State honors and added a high school state title his senior year. Ben has continued in the soccer community, coaching at Eastside Timbers since mid-2020 at the youth level and taking teams to the U.S. Futsal National Championship Men's Open finals and semifinals in 2024 and 2025 respectively.
He still sees the same struggle in the kids he coaches today, talented players stretched thin by a system that was never built to hold school and sport together. That's what keeps him refining the idea, using the connections he's built along the way to help perfect the method and make sure everyone has access to it. He saw through his own experience how much interest drives real learning, and that bringing that interest into the classroom can change a kid's whole trajectory.
Ben brought that same builder's instinct to his career. At Greystone, he served as Business Technology Manager for the company's FHA division, the nation's top FHA multifamily and healthcare lender, leading technology and process improvement for a team of over 100 people and designing the enterprise-wide reporting for the management committee. He led the team that built a powerful deal-management platform in house, on par with enterprise tools. Knowing how to build something real at scale is what let him turn what he sketched out in Brazil into Cardo.
M.S. Real Estate Development, Portland State University · B.S. Accounting, Gonzaga University · Head Soccer Coach, Eastside Timbers FC, 2020-Present
Dr. Van Truong
Chief Academic Officer
Dr. Truong has spent her career building access where none existed. Her own education began at Saint Paul French International Baccalaureate School in Vietnam. In 1975, she left with her family as a refugee and resettled in the United States. She started as a classroom aide in Portland Public Schools (PPS) and spent the next thirty years inside that same system, rising through teacher, assistant principal, principal, ESL Director, Executive Director of the Office of Teaching and Learning, and interim Assistant Superintendent. She now serves as a Director on the Beaverton School District Board.
As Executive Director, she led at real scale, managing a $160 million budget and overseeing the district's International Baccalaureate, Advanced Placement, English language learner, special education, and dual language immersion programs across the system. She aligned AP programming and drove growth across schools that had previously operated independently of each other. She also trained a leadership network of more than 300 administrators and 190 teacher-leaders, work that shaped how an entire district ran, not just one classroom or one school.
During her time in PPS, she was a creator, bringing an 18-year non-compliant program into full federal compliance within two years, building a curriculum the state later adopted as its own standard. She used that same instinct to develop something new too, founding the Pacific Northwest's first Vietnamese Dual Language Program and taking it from an idea to a real, working model.
Long before she helped build the Cardo Method, she was living the exact problem it was built to solve, right in her own home. Raising four children while working full-time and finishing her own education came at a real cost, games and championships and other moments she missed along the way, time spent instead fighting to make the system work better for every family in it. Three of her children went on to play tennis in college, and watching her own kids and students balance homework with practice and tournaments gave her a firsthand education in the exact problem Cardo exists to solve. It's part of why she built the academic side of the Cardo Method to work with a serious training schedule instead of against it.
Doctorate in Education, University of Portland · M.A. Education, B.A. Applied Linguistics & French · Fluent in English, French, and Vietnamese · Founder, PPS Vietnamese Dual Language Program · Former Interim Assistant Superintendent, Portland Public Schools · Board Director, Beaverton School District