Special Advisors

Meredith Blake, Cause & Affect
Michael Brown, City Year
Richard Cavanagh, The Conference Board, Inc.
William Ford, General Atlantic, LLC
Rosanne Haggerty, Common Ground
Michael Loeb, Loeb Enterprises
Mario Morino, Venture Philanthropy Partners
Bill Shore, Share Our Strength
William Shutkin, University of Colorado Boulder

Meredith Blake

Meredith Blake is a social change strategist and is a nationally recognized public interest attorney, advocate, and social entrepreneur, with over a decade of experience in creating positive social change. She previously served as Executive Vice President, Corporate & Community Affairs of Participant Productions and as President of the Participant Foundation. As a 1998 Echoing Green Fellow, Meredith founded the nonprofit legal services agency called Break the Cycle, which empowers youth to end domestic violence. As Founder and CEO, Meredith took the organization national in 2003 in order to serve youth in communities around the country. She received undergraduate degrees in political science and mass communications from the University of California at Berkeley and a JD from UCLA. 

Michael Brown

A 1991 Echoing Green Fellow, Michael Brown is the co-founder and president of City Year, a national youth service corps that helped to inspire the development of AmeriCorps, the nation's federal investment in national youth service. Before founding City Year with his college roommate, Alan Khazei, Michael served as a legislative aide for then Congressman Leon Panetta; a public information officer for the City Volunteer Corps (CVC) of New York City; and law clerk for Federal Judge Stephen Breyer, now a Supreme Court Justice. Michael Brown has been awarded the Reebok Human Rights Award, the Jefferson Award of the American Institute for Public Service, the National Caring Award, the Boston Bar Association's Public Service Award, and four honorary degrees, including doctor of public service from Northeastern University. Michael is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he served as a member of the Harvard Law Review. 

Richard Cavanagh

Richard (Dick) Cavanagh is the former President and Chief Executive Officer of The Conference Board, Inc., the global research and business membership group. The Conference Board, which connects some 2,000 enterprises in sixty nations, is the most widely-cited private source of business intelligence. Dick joined The Conference Board in November 1995 after serving as Executive Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government for eight years. Earlier he spent fifteen years with McKinsey & Company, Inc., the international management consulting firm. He led McKinsey’s efforts to reorganize the nation’s bankrupt railroads into Conrail – at the time the largest industrial reorganization in history. From 1977 to 1979, Dick held senior posts at the White House Office of Management & Budget where he led a government-wide effort to improve cash management that saved $12 billion. He also directed the President's Reorganization Project for domestic programs. He is the co-author (with Donald K. Clifford. Jr.) of The Winning Performance – How America’s High-Growth Midsize Companies Succeed, a best-selling book published in thirteen national editions. He received his BA from Wesleyan University (where he is a Trustee Emeritus) and his MBA from the Harvard Business School.

Guy de Chazal

Until recently, Guy was a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley and President of Morgan Stanley Venture Partners (MSVP). He remains on the board of one of MSVP’s portfolio companies, Thrupoint Technologies and a previous portfolio company, Lionbridge Technologies (LIOX). He also serves on the board of Uhlig. He served on the board of the National Venture Capital Association, co-chairing the Education Committee and chairing the Annual Convention in 2005. In 2004 and 2005, he was an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, teaching Venture Capital to second year MBA students. Prior to his twenty-two years at Morgan Stanley, he worked at Citicorp Venture Capital and, before that, McKinsey and Co. In the nonprofit sector, Guy serves on four boards; he is chairman of Fountain House, a residential, service and advocacy program for people living with mental illness. He also serves on the boards of two Connecticut schools, Eagle Hill in Greenwich and Suffield Academy, and the Meadowbrook Hunt Club on Long Island. Guy has a BS Engineering from Manchester University in the UK and an MBA from Harvard University. He is married to Kitty Choate and has two teenage children, Justine and David.

William Ford

William (Bill) Ford is President of General Atlantic, a global private equity firm. Previously he worked at Morgan Stanley & Company as an investment banker. He is active in a number of educational and nonprofit institutions. Currently he is a member of the Board of Trustees of Amherst College, Common Ground Community, the United Hospital Fund, and Friends of the Family Academy in Manhattan. Bill received a BA in Economics from Amherst College and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Rosanne Haggerty

Rosanne Haggerty is a real estate entrepreneur who conceived and founded Common Ground, a nonprofit housing development and management organization in New York City, which provides innovative housing opportunities for homeless adults. Her flagship restoration projects, converting two decaying hotels in the heart of Manhattan into more than 1,000 attractive living spaces for homeless and low-income tenants, are not only important historical restorations, but also bold experiments in financing, developing, and managing residences – these facilities provide to the residents support, structure, and employment opportunities while simultaneously serving as a nexus for neighborhood revitalization. Rosanne is a committed social service champion and determined leader who applies her expertise in real estate, finance, management, and strategic planning to address the unique challenges of housing low-income or otherwise disadvantaged urban residents. Her work to date highlights the promise for still further creative advances towards eradicating homelessness. Rosanne is graduated from Amherst College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Historical Preservation. She is the recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship.

Michael Loeb

Michael Loeb is the President & CEO of Loeb Enterprises, which combines elements of an idea lab, an angel investment firm, and a company incubator to generate and finance ideas through the beta stage using internal resources. Michael is the former President & CEO of Synapse Group, Inc., the largest seller of consumer magazine subscriptions in the United States, which he co-founded in 1992 with Jay Walker, founder of priceline.com. In 2001, Time Warner purchased control of Synapse in a transaction valued in excess of $500 million by the Wall Street Journal. Time Warner completed its acquisition of the company in 2006. In 2004 and 2005 the company was named one of the twenty-five “Best Places to Work in America” among medium-sized companies by the Society for Human Resource Management. Before becoming an entrepreneur, Michael was a marketing executive at Time Warner. As Vice President of Consumer Marketing, he helped launch Entertainment Weekly. Previously, Michael was the Consumer Marketing Director of Sports Illustrated and helped launch Sports Illustrated for Kids, SI Video, the SI Catalog, as well as other ancillary businesses. Michael, is a graduate of Amherst College.

Mario Morino

Mario Morino is chairman of Venture Philanthropy Partners and the Morino Institute. Before retiring from private industry in 1992, Mario was the Co-Founder of one of the then ten largest software and services firms. Since leaving private industry in 1992, Mario has focused his efforts on philanthropic innovation to benefit children and families of working poor or poverty backgrounds, and has served in advisory roles with General Atlantic. In his philanthropic work, Mario founded the Morino Institute in 1994 to advance the vision that all children have the opportunity to grow into adults leading healthy, productive lives. In 2000, Mario Co-founded Venture Philanthropy Partners (VPP) as an innovative investor in social change that concentrates investments of money, expertise, and contacts to improve the lives and boost the opportunities of children of low-income families in the National Capital Region. Mario is a graduate of Case Western Reserve University.

Bill Shore

Bill Shore is the Founder and Executive Director of Share Our Strength, a national nonprofit that inspires and organizes individuals and businesses to share their strengths in innovative ways to help end hunger. Bill is also the chairman of Community Wealth Ventures, Inc., a for-profit subsidiary of Share Our Strength, that provides consulting services. Since its founding, Share Our Strength has raised over $180 million to support more than 1,000 anti-hunger, anti-poverty groups worldwide. In 1997, Bill launched Community Wealth Ventures, Inc. to provide strategic counsel to corporations, foundations and nonprofit organizations interested in creating community wealth – resources generated through profitable enterprise to promote social change. From 1988 to 1991, Bill served as chief of staff for U.S. Senator Robert Kerrey (D-Neb.) Shore’s books include: Revolution of the Heart, The Cathedral Within, and The Light of Conscience. He currently serves on the board of directors of The Timberland Company. Bill teaches a class on social entrepreneurship at New York University’s Stern School of Business as an adjunct professor and has been a guest lecturer at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Bill is also a recipient of numerous awards, including the 1991 Humanitarian of the Year, the 1994 Washingtonian of the Year and the Caring Institute's top ten caring people of 1995, one of 1999's The Non Profit Times "Power and Influence Top 50 Leaders" and Bon Appetit's 1999 Humanitarian of the Year. He earned his BA from the University of Pennsylvania and his JD from George Washington University.

William Shutkin

William (Bill) Shutkin is a writer, lawyer, and social entrepreneur and until recently was President and Chief Executive Officer of The Orton Family Foundation, the Vermont and Colorado-based operating foundation that promotes civic innovation in land use planning as a pathway to sustainable communities. He is currently Chair of Sustainable Development at Leeds School of Business, University of Colorado Boulder. Bill received an Echoing Green Fellowship in 1993 to support the development of the Boston-based Alternatives for Community & Environment (ACE), one of the nation's premier environmental justice law and education centers. He is also Co-Founder and former Executive Director of New Ecology Inc., a nonprofit environmental organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that promotes sustainable urban development. From 1999 to 2004, Bill taught environmental law and policy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. He is the author of The Land That Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the Twenty-First Century, which won the 2001 Best Book Award for Ecological and Transformational Politics from the American Political Science Association, was a Time Magazine 2002 Green Century Recommended Book, and was translated into Hindi for publication in India.