About Sasha

I spend my days as the the Chief Innovation Officer at Acumen Fund.  We are a nonprofit venture fund that is creating a world beyond poverty by investing in social enterprises, emerging leaders, and breakthrough ideas.  I am also a blogger and speaker about generosity, philanthropy, and social change.

It all started with my Manifesto for Nonprofit CEOs, and my realization that if the nonprofit sector is ever going to realize its potential, we have to stop apologizing about the value of the work that we do.

In 2011, a small group of friends and I created Generosity Day, a reboot of Valentine’s Day on February 14th.  We’re doing it again in 2012, so subscribe to this blog if you want to stay up-to-date.  The idea sprung from my generosity experiment, which I explain in this video (or click on the picture on the right), which was recently posted on TED.com.

And here’s a quick Innovation Agents profile from Fast Company.

Some of my recent speaking events:

• Tiger 21 – February 3, Scottsdale, AZ
• Unite for Sight – April 21, New Haven, CT
• DO Lectures – April 28, Wales

If you’d like to contact me for a speaking event you can email me here.

Previous jobs, degrees, and all that stuff:

• My first real job was at Booz-Allen where I spent most of my time working for telecom companies in South America and Europe. I worked on one huge privatization and did a bunch of strategy, acquisition, and market expansion work. Good stuff, tons of travel, I was thrown in the deep end and managed to swim.
• Then I went to Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School, and spent one summer in Indonesia at the microfinance bank Bank Rakyat Indonesia and the next summer at a venture-backed startup called Navic Networks (which was recently acquired by Microsoft).
• After graduate school I worked at IBM and then at GE Money in Corporate Citizenship.
• And I’ve been at Acumen Fund since January 2007.

Article citations and other such stuff:

• Dowser.org – Trends to look for in 2011 and 2011 Year in Review
• The American Prospect, Gatekeepers (article on Gates Foundation)
• 2010 Jury, Buckminster Fuller Challenge
• The Financial Times: Investors Boost the “Missing Middle”
• Families in Business: Philanthropy and Microfinance, July/Aug 2008
• Investors’ Dealers Digest: The Forgotten Squeeze
• Jetwork Magazine

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