(Professional bio -- for Networks conference)

Jacob Harold oversees grants in the Hewlett Foundation’s Philanthropy Program.  The Program seeks to improve the practice of philanthropy and to provide resources to support strategic decision-making by donors.  The Program’s grantees provide data about nonprofit performance, operate donor engagement programs, and do research about strategic philanthropy. 

Harold joined the Foundation from The Bridgespan Group--a nonprofit spin-off of Bain and Company--where he advised a variety of nonprofit and foundation clients on programmatic and organizational strategy.  He has worked as an climate change consultant in New Delhi, India for the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and as a climate change campaigner for Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace USA.  Before that, he was the organizing director for Citizen Works, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit focused on corporate governance issues, and spent a year as a grassroots organizer with Green Corps, where he led campaigns on climate change, forest protection and tobacco control in cities across the country.

Harold received a BA summa cum laude from Duke University, where he designed his own major in ethics and intellectual history, and earned an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business.  He trained in business strategy with Bain and Company and studied complex systems science in Beijing at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.  Harold was born and raised in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where his parents ran small community-based nonprofit organizations.