Jacob Harold is a nonresident fellow in the Center on Nonprofits and Philanthropy at the Urban Institute. He brings expertise as a social change strategist, author, and executive.
Before joining Urban, Harold served as president and CEO of GuideStar and cofounder of Candid, which was formed in 2019 by the merger of GuideStar and Foundation Center. He joined GuideStar from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where he led grantmaking for the Philanthropy Program. Between 2006 and 2012, he managed $30 million in grants to build a 21st-century infrastructure for smart giving. Before that, he worked as a consultant at the Bridgespan Group and as a climate change campaigner and strategist with the Packard Foundation, Rainforest Action Network, and Greenpeace USA. He began his career as a grassroots organizer with Green Corps.
Harold has written extensively on climate change and philanthropic strategy. His book, The Toolbox: Strategies for Crafting Social Impact, was published in December 2022 by Wiley.
He earned an AB summa cum laude from Duke University and an MBA from Stanford University. Harold served as a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations and has further training from Bain, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Santa Fe Institute, and the School for International Training Tibetan Studies Program, where he did the first translations of newly discovered poems by the sixth Dalai Lama. He serves on the boards of the US Climate Action Network, Rewiring America, and the Duke University Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship.
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