economic-mobility
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Austin Community Foundation
Austin Community Foundation has turned one woman’s $30,000 bequest into a $669 million piece of civic infrastructure. Its real product is not charity paperwork - it is making local generosity easier to deploy, harder to waste and patient enough to outlive the donor.
Anne Rascón
Anne Rascón is the Executive Director of the Better Health Better Pay Collaborative (BHBP), a nonprofit that stitches together two systems that rarely talk to each other - healthcare and workforce development. She works to connect Medicaid members and Managed Care Organizations with education, training, and employment so that better jobs lead to better health. Her career spans the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, including national workforce training programs and advisory work with the U.S. Department of Labor, large employers, and workforce boards. In 2023 she helped launch the Florida Self-Sufficiency Council with Simply Healthcare and Florida's 24 workforce development boards.
Angela Rachidi
Angela Rachidi is a senior fellow and the Rowe Scholar in opportunity and mobility studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where she studies poverty and how federal safety-net programs shape the lives of low-income Americans. A former New York City welfare official turned think-tank scholar, she has become one of Washington's most-cited voices on SNAP, the Child Tax Credit, child care, and the link between work and poverty - testifying repeatedly before Congress and arguing that programs should pull families toward employment and self-sufficiency, not away from it. A Lancaster, Wisconsin native and four-time all-conference college softball player, she runs her own research firm and works from Middleton, Wisconsin.
Braven
Braven is a national nonprofit career accelerator that partners with large public universities and employers to help first-generation, low-income, and underrepresented college students land strong first jobs. Through a semester-long, cohort-based course followed by post-graduation support, Braven equips Fellows with the skills, confidence, experiences, and professional networks they need to translate a college degree into economic mobility. Founded in 2013 by former Teach For America executive Aimée Eubanks Davis, Braven has reached more than 15,000 Fellows across cities including Chicago, Newark, New York, Atlanta, the Bay Area, and beyond.
Kesha Cash
Kesha Cash is the Founder and General Partner of Impact America Fund, the largest VC firm in America run entirely by a Black woman. Based in Oakland, California, she manages $65 million across two funds, backing technology-enabled startups that serve low-to-moderate income and overlooked communities. Her portfolio includes Esusu (a fintech unicorn), Mayvenn, SoLo Funds, and CareAcademy. A former Wall Street analyst who grew up on a farm in South Carolina and was the first in her family to attend college, Cash draws on lived experience of economic inequality to identify billion-dollar opportunities that traditional investors routinely miss.