Jen Holleran is a longtime educator and nonprofit leader focused on educational equity and student centered, deeper learning and other paths to economic mobility. She is focused on helping donors and foundations develop paths to more meaningful and significant giving, and connecting them to the proximate leaders in this work. She also draws on a deep network of foundation leaders and other advisors to find the right expertise for different issue areas to enable donors to find giving and investing paths that suit them best.
Jen has worked side by side with some of the country's largest donors, helping to deploy hundreds of millions of dollars with impact, including launching and leading Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s philanthropy through Startup:Education (an education precursor to the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative), enabling the launch of their venture investing and the Primary School, as well as working with some of New England’s leading donors. Jen draws on her decades of experience in education as a high school teacher and principal, a leader of small schools distort and charter work in Oakland and founder of the Bay Area New Leaders for New Schools.
In addition to directly advising and supporting a set of philanthropists and foundations, Jen co-facilitates an ongoing national funder group on the Future of Learning and School Design comprised of program officers from two dozen of the largest foundations in the country. She co-leads an effort to make sense of the shifting modernizing education ecosystem with particular interest in sharing the emerging landscape with donors to activate more funding. Jen is a fellow in the Advisors Accelerator, a group of philanthropic advisors led by Building Impact, and a member of P150, a global group of philanthropic advisors sponsored by Schmidt Futures. Jen is an Aspen Global Leaders Network fellow as a Pahara fellow.
Jen is focused on how to help philanthropists navigate inflection points, including early interest identification and activation, as well as impact investing and enabling other mission focused efforts. She is interested in different funding mechanisms and capital flows to get resources to proximate leaders, particularly those focused on enabling every child to create a thriving, choice filled adulthood and enabling economic mobility.
Personal:
Jen holds her MBA from Yale and her BA and MEd from Harvard, where she was two time captain of the national championship squash team, as well as individual national champion and the recipient of the Mary G. Paget Prize for the senior who has contributed the most to women's athletics. She is a Pahara Institute Fellow and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network (AGLN). She and her husband live outside of Boston with their teenage twin sons. She still loves playing racquet sports, biking, hiking and traveling.