nonprofit
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Christopher Slatt and the business of letting people in
He co-founded WatchGuard to help businesses secure their networks. At Starfire Sports, Christopher Slatt put his experience to work on another problem: giving more children a place to play.
John O’Nolan and the company he can never sell
Ghost’s co-founder made independence a condition of the business. From a music-school detour to a publishing platform built to outlast him, John O’Nolan keeps asking who the tools really serve.
Amanda Nguyen
Amanda Nguyen is a Vietnamese-American civil rights activist, author, and commercial astronaut who founded the nonprofit Rise after surviving sexual assault as a Harvard senior. She drafted the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act, which passed Congress unanimously in 2016, and has helped pass dozens of laws protecting survivors. Nominated for the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize and named a 2022 Time Woman of the Year, she became the first Vietnamese and Southeast Asian woman in space aboard Blue Origin's NS-31 flight on April 14, 2025, fulfilling an astronaut dream she set aside for a decade to fight for survivors.
David Katznelson
David Katznelson is a Grammy-nominated music producer turned cultural entrepreneur who runs Reboot, the nonprofit network of 650-plus Jewish and Jew-ish creatives that reimagines Jewish life through arts and culture. A former Warner Bros. Records A&R vice president who signed and worked with The Flaming Lips, Mudhoney and Nick Cave, he founded the independent label Birdman Records, co-founded the Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation and San Francisco's all-night DAWN Shavuot festival, and in 2022 launched Reboot Studios to give early-stage funding to new Jewish stories across film, theater, music and television. He still writes The Signal, a Substack about the records the world loved and lost.
Edith Elliott
Edith Elliott is the co-founder and co-CEO of Noora Health, a global nonprofit that turns hospital waiting rooms into classrooms and trains family members to care for their loved ones after discharge. What started as a Stanford design class project at a Bangalore hospital in 2012 has grown into an organization that has trained more than a million family caregivers across India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Indonesia. A TED speaker, Audacious Project winner and Skoll awardee, Elliott has built her career at the intersection of research, policy and design, betting that the most overlooked resource in any health system is the people already sitting at the bedside.
Gerry Poirier
Gerry Poirier is the founder and CEO of AngeLink, billed as the world's first social crowdfunding platform powered by women. After more than two decades on Wall Street trading floors at Credit Suisse and Lazard, where she was often the only woman in the room, she built an AI-driven, fraud-resistant fundraising platform that has grown to roughly 55,000 active users across 100 currencies and raised over $7.3 million in seed funding. A Wharton-trained, globe-trotting risk-taker based in Naples, Florida, she also runs the AngeLink Community Foundation, a 501(c)(3) making direct impact grants.
Ilana Walder-Biesanz
Ilana Walder-Biesanz is the founder and CEO of National Math Stars, a nonprofit that finds mathematically extraordinary children as early as second and third grade and gives each of them a decade of mentorship, advising, and funding worth more than $100,000. A child prodigy herself who took college courses at 13 and finished her undergraduate degree at 19, she pairs an engineer's rigor with a theater critic's flair. Before building National Math Stars she was a product manager at Yahoo, a Bain consultant, a Gates Cambridge Scholar, a Fulbright researcher of German opera staging, and a working opera critic. In December 2025, Jeff and Lauren Sanchez Bezos named her one of five recipients of a $5 million Courage & Civility Award.
Maen Mahfoud
Maen Mahfoud is the founder and CEO of Replate, a technology-driven food rescue organization he started in 2016 while studying molecular biology at UC Berkeley. Raised in Syria, where his mother sent him out on his bike to deliver the family's surplus lunch to neighbors in need, he came to California to study medicine and instead built a logistics-and-software platform that dispatches drivers to collect leftover food from businesses and route it to nonprofits. Replate has recovered millions of pounds of surplus food, served hundreds of community organizations, and counts Netflix, Walmart, Amazon, Chipotle, and Slack among its corporate donors. He is a 2023 James Irvine Foundation Leadership Award recipient and a DRK entrepreneur.
Rachel Schneider
Rachel Schneider is the founder and CEO of Canary, a New York fintech that lets employers and donors give tax-free emergency cash grants to workers in crisis. Before building software, she spent years studying how American families actually handle money - co-authoring the acclaimed book The Financial Diaries with economist Jonathan Morduch - and held senior roles at Merrill Lynch, the Aspen Institute, and the Financial Health Network. Canary turned that research into a product: a confidential application that moves money to people at the moment they need it most.
Rohan Pavuluri
Rohan Pavuluri is the Chief Business Officer at Speechify, the consumer voice-AI app, and the co-founder of Upsolve, the nonprofit whose free online tool has helped low-income Americans erase hundreds of millions of dollars in debt through bankruptcy. A Harvard statistics graduate and Phillips Exeter alum, he built Upsolve out of a Harvard Law access-to-justice lab as an undergraduate, led it as CEO until 2022, and now serves as its volunteer board chair. He is a TED Fellow, a TIME100 Next honoree, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 recognized for arguing that civil rights should be free.
Viveka Hulyalkar
Viveka Hulyalkar is the co-founder and CEO of Beam Impact, a New York customer engagement and loyalty platform that lets shoppers direct a slice of everyday purchases to nonprofits at no extra cost. A McKinsey alum and Brown honors graduate, she set out to fix what she calls broken retention marketing by tying brand loyalty to the causes young consumers actually care about. Beam works with 130+ mission-driven brands including Instacart, IKEA and Roots Canada, and Hulyalkar's stated goal is to shift $10 billion from brands to high-impact nonprofits. She is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Social Impact.
Daniella Vallurupalli
Daniella Vallurupalli is the Vice President and Head of Global Communications at Cloudflare, the internet infrastructure and security company. She joined Cloudflare in 2014 when it had fewer than 80 employees and built its communications organization from the ground up. Today she oversees all internal and external communications across public relations, corporate and employee comms, analyst relations, social media, and visual storytelling for one of the most recognized brands in cloud networking and cybersecurity.
Natalie Gibralter
Natalie Gibralter is a New York-based product executive currently serving as VP of Product, AI Innovation for Microsoft Experience and Devices. She built her reputation as the first Product Manager at Squarespace, scaling the company's commerce platform through a decade of 10x growth to IPO. Before tech, she founded TrailTalks, a nonprofit bridging young Israeli backpackers with international peers, and helped launch KIND's social mission. An Oxford-trained philosopher turned product leader, she was named to Crain's New York Business 40 Under 40 in 2022 and is known for building empowered, outcome-focused teams at the intersection of people and technology.
Alicia Hardy
Alicia Hardy (Alicia Ferguson Hardy) is the CEO of CommuniCare+OLE, a federally qualified health center serving 70,000+ patients across Napa, Solano, and Yolo counties in California. A licensed clinical social worker turned executive, she rose through the ranks of OLE Health over more than a decade before becoming CEO in 2018, then engineered the landmark 2023 merger with CommuniCare Health Centers - a project she developed as her capstone during an Executive MBA at Yale School of Management. Named one of Yale SOM's 2023 Best & Brightest EMBA graduates, Hardy is a passionate advocate for health equity, multilingual care, and expanding access for underserved populations.
Cecilia Aviles
Cecilia Aviles, MBA, BSN, RN, is the Chief Executive Officer of LifeLong Medical Care, a Federally Qualified Health Center serving over 55,000 patients across Contra Costa and Alameda Counties in the East Bay. A native San Franciscan who started her career as a trauma nurse, she brings more than 20 years of healthcare leadership experience — including 11 years at Sutter Health and earlier stints at Kaiser Permanente, UCSF, KPMG, and McKesson — to lead one of the Bay Area's most vital safety-net providers. A Carol Emmott Fellow and recognized among the Bay Area's top Hispanic nurses, she is committed to making healthcare accessible, equitable, and affordable for underserved communities.
Chuck Collins
Chuck Collins (Charles M. Collins) is a Harvard-trained lawyer, MIT city planner, and former real estate developer who spent nearly two decades as President and CEO of YMCA of Greater San Francisco, transforming it into an organization serving more than 42,000 children annually across three Bay Area counties. Born in San Francisco's Fillmore district in 1947 and raised as one of the first Black families in Mill Valley, he brings a lifetime of crossing boundaries to his work at the intersection of community, equity, and opportunity. Now a Presidential Fellow at USF's Leo T. McCarthy Center for Public Service, he continues to shape the region's civic life.
David Werdegar
Dr. David Werdegar, MD, MPH is the former President and CEO of Institute on Aging (IOA), San Francisco's leading nonprofit dedicated to helping older adults and adults with disabilities live with dignity and independence. A physician trained at New York Medical College and UCSF, Werdegar transformed IOA from a community program into a comprehensive elder-care organization serving thousands annually across the San Francisco Bay Area. Under his watch, IOA opened a landmark 50,000-square-foot campus on Geary Boulevard in 2011, consolidating programs spanning home care, dementia day enrichment, and the 24/7 Friendship Line warmline. He retired in 2022 after steering the organization to nearly $100 million in annual revenue with a staff of around 900.
Jamie Almanza
Jamie Almanza is the CEO of Bay Area Community Services (BACS), a 70-year-old Oakland nonprofit she has led since 2010 - scaling it from a small mental-health agency into a 500+ person, $100M+ social impact operation that houses, supports, and prevents homelessness for more than 20,000 Northern Californians a year.
Geetha Murali
Dr. Geetha Murali is the chief executive officer of Room to Read, the global literacy and girls' education nonprofit headquartered in San Francisco. The first non-founder CEO of the organization, she leads a team of roughly 1,200 staff across 29 countries and a network of more than 20,000 partners and volunteers. Under her watch, Room to Read's programs have reached over 60 million children. A PhD in South Asian politics with a master's in biostatistics, she frames her work through a personal lens: her mother was nearly a child bride, and her family's trajectory shifted in a single generation.
Jane Garcia
Jane Garcia has run La Clínica de La Raza since 1982, growing a scrappy storefront clinic in Oakland's Fruitvale into a $150M federally qualified health center serving more than 86,000 patients across Alameda, Contra Costa and Solano counties. She walked in as a Berkeley public health intern in 1978 and never left, building a Bay Area institution while suing two federal administrations over immigrant care.
Jim Hori
Jim Hori is President and CEO of the YMCA of Silicon Valley, one of the largest YMCA associations in the United States. He took the helm in June 2022 after 22 years at Silicon Valley Bank, where he served as Managing Director and led the SVB Foundation for 19 years. A Fresno native and Fresno State graduate, Hori spent more than a decade on the YMCA board before being asked to run the place.
John T. Ehrbar
John T. Ehrbar is a career YMCA leader who, starting January 26, 2026, takes the helm as President and CEO of the YMCA of Silicon Valley after six years running YMCA Buffalo Niagara. He has spent over two decades inside the Y movement, climbing from a high school Leaders Club kid in northeast Ohio to running an 80-million-dollar nonprofit serving 2,300 staff across the Bay Area.
Noah Schwartz
Noah G. Schwartz is President and Chief Executive Officer of The John Stewart Company, California's largest manager of affordable housing. He joined JSCo in 2013 as COO, was named President of Property Management in 2023, and elevated to President & CEO in January 2024. Before JSCo he led affordable housing and community action agencies across Virginia and Arizona, bringing 15+ years of nonprofit and quasi-government leadership to the operations of more than 30,000 housing units.
Marty Lynch
Marty Lynch, PhD, MPA, is CEO Emeritus of LifeLong Medical Care, the Berkeley-based federally qualified health center he led for nearly four decades. He grew a small Over 60 Health Center into a 16-clinic network covering Alameda, Contra Costa, and Marin counties, and now lectures at UC Berkeley while serving on California's Master Plan for Aging Advisory Committee.
Ken Berrick
Ken Berrick founded Seneca Family of Agencies in 1985 in Oakland and spent four decades turning a single home for boys into a 1,900-person nonprofit serving children across California and Washington through a model he calls Unconditional Care. Now CEO Emeritus of Seneca and President and CEO of Just Advocates, he keeps arguing the same line: kids aren't failing the system, the system is failing kids.
Leticia Galyean Sturtevant
Leticia Galyean Sturtevant, LCSW, is the CEO of Seneca Family of Agencies, an Oakland-based nonprofit serving more than 18,000 youth and families a year across California and Washington. She started as a counselor in 2001 and has spent more than two decades inside the same organization, climbing from direct service to running it.
Reymundo Espinoza
Reymundo C. Espinoza is the CEO Emeritus of Gardner Health Services, the San Jose community clinic network he ran for 37 years before stepping down in January 2024. The son of a single farmworker father from Coachella, he carried a Stanford political science degree and a Berkeley public health degree into a small nonprofit serving Mexican farm and cannery workers, and left it a 10-site, $90 million system caring for more than 46,000 of Silicon Valley's poorest residents.
Thomas Moran
Thomas (Tom) Moran is the former President and CEO of Goodwill Central Coast, the Salinas-based nonprofit that runs retail thrift stores, donation centers, and job-training programs across Santa Cruz, Monterey, and San Luis Obispo counties. A physics major turned MBA turned retail-finance lifer, he came in as CFO in 2018 and was elevated to CEO in 2020 after stints at Conn's, West Marine, ARAMARK, Limited Brands, and CarMax.
Abhishek Humbad
Abhishek Humbad is the Founder & CEO of Goodera, the world's largest corporate volunteering platform, connecting 500+ enterprises - including 75+ Fortune 500 companies like Amazon, Nike, Oracle, and Target - with 50,000+ nonprofits across 100+ countries. A BITS Pilani and IIM Bangalore alumnus and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Humbad co-founded Goodera in 2014 after pioneering NextGen, India's first cloud-based CSR management platform. Under his leadership, Goodera has mobilized 2 million+ volunteers across 1,000+ cities in 30+ languages, raised $26M+ in funding, and now deploys an AI Ops Brain managing 100,000+ tasks monthly - treating volunteering not as a charity checkbox, but as infrastructure for workplace belonging.
Munier Afshar
Munier Afshar is a co-founder at Maze, the AI-powered user research and continuous product discovery platform trusted by over 60,000 brands including Atlassian, Lowe's, and Sony. Based in the Baltimore/Washington DC area, Afshar helped build Maze into a category-defining research platform that raised a $40M Series B in 2022, bringing total funding to over $57M. Beyond tech, he serves as Vice President of the Afghan Relief Fund, lending organizational leadership to a nonprofit supporting vulnerable Afghan families. His career spans entrepreneurship, operations, and community impact.