Heather McLeod Grant is a thought leader, entrepreneur, and senior advisor with more than 30 years experience in the social sector. She is the co-founder of Open Impact–a national philanthropy advising firm based in Silicon Valley–who brings creativity, strategic insight, compelling storytelling, and a racial justice lens to her work. For the past two decades, she has advised top nonprofits, foundations, and donors on scaling their impact–with an emphasis on strategy formation, organizational capacity building, leadership development, and networks for social change. 

 Heather is co-author of the bestselling book Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High Impact Nonprofits, and numerous other publications and reports, including The Giving Code, The Giving Journey, Pioneers in Justice, The New Normal, Building Capacity for Sustained Collaboration, and Leading Systems Change. Her work has been cited widely in the mainstream press, and she has delivered more than 150 keynote speeches or workshops at industry conferences. Heather began her career as an Echoing Green Fellow and co-founder of Who Cares magazine in the 1990s. She then worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Co. and helped lead Monitor Institute’s nonprofit practice before co-founding Open Impact in 2016. She has been a Venture Partner with Draper Richards Kaplan; designed and ran the Irvine New Leadership Network in California’s Central Valley for five years; has served on multiple local, national, and global nonprofit boards; and was recently named among the 25 most influential Bay Area leaders in San Francisco magazine. Heather has an MBA from Stanford University and an AB from Harvard, and lives in Silicon Valley with her husband and teen daughter.