Founder and PresidentFledgling Fund
I founded The Fledgling Fund in 2005 after a long career at Harvard University where I taught at both the School of Public Health and Harvard Business School. Areas of interest included the global burden of disease, particularly HIV-AIDS and malaria and a range of solutions including private/public partnerships in the U.S as well as India, Colombia, Mexico and Peru. I also worked with many corporations who were interested in playing a role solving social problems including diversity, sustainable housing, and health benefits
Fledgling is a private foundation and our focus is on the use of storytelling to encourage and support social change. We define "storytelling" quite broadly; we include documentary film, photography, immersive journalism and virtual reality. While we are somewhat issue agnostic, we look for projects that are well underway and need financial support to amplify the goals of the project into measurable social objectives. We do not fund production, we only fund outreach initiatives and have supported about 350 projects to date. We also provide a year long laboratory for filmmakers who want to mount significant outreach efforts around their project and need help developing partners, learning necessary social media skills, deciding what to outsource and what to complete in house. They meet three times during this year long program in person and use intensive virtual meetings throughout the year to learn and to build a community among themselves. We work with a range of partners, foundations as well as individuals to support the highly vetted projects that we choose. Each year we review about 1200 projects to choose 15 or 20 to support.
I live in New York City and have three children, two of whom are entrepreneurs!