Heather McLeod-Grant

Heather McLeod-Grant is a published author, speaker and consultant to high-impact organizations. She is the co-author of Forces for Good - The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits (Wiley, 2008), which was named a Top Ten Book of 2007 by the Economist. Additionally, she serves as a consultant for the Monitor Institute and as an advisor to the Center for Social Innovation at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, and to leading nonprofits and foundations.

She is a former McKinsey & Company consultant and a co-founder of Who Cares, a national magazine for young social entrepreneurs published from 1993-1999. Heather teaches at Stanford, and speaks and presents widely at industry conferences on Forces for Good, social entrepreneurship, nonprofit leadership, and strategic philanthropy. She has been published in the New York Times, Inc., the American Prospect, and Alliance, and has appeared on CNN and NPR. Heather serves on the Advisory Boards of the Stanford Social Innovation Review and the National Civic League. She holds an MBA from Stanford University and her BA from Harvard University, and resides in the Bay Area with her husband and daughter.

In her facilitated session, Heather will share the six practices of high-impact nonprofits and help attendees experience the importance of networks to achieving these.  She will challenge organizations to embrace their vision during these economic times while also providing steps to become a more effective organization.

To read more from Forces for Good: The Six Practices of High-Impact Nonprofits click here.

Jan Masaoka

Jan Masaoka is a leading writer and thinker on nonprofit organizations with particular emphasis on boards of directors, business planning, and the role of nonprofits in society. She is currently the Director and Editor-in-Chief of an online nonprofit magazine:  Blue Avocado (www.blueavocado.org), which launched in April of 2008 and in March of 2009 it had 50,000 subscribers. She recently left her position of 14 years as executive director of CompassPoint Nonprofit Services (www.compasspoint.org), a consulting and training firm for nonprofits based in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. In that position she was named Nonprofit Executive of the Year by NonProfit Times in 2003.

Jan has written the Board Café newsletter for nonprofit boards (now a column in Blue Avocado), which was compiled into The Best of the Board Café (Fieldstone Press, Second Edition to be published summer of 2009). She wrote All Hands on Board: The Board of Directors in All-Volunteer Organizations (BoardSource), and her research work includes studies on women executive directors of color, executive director tenure, all-volunteer organizations, and nonprofit space & occupancy needs. 

She is a frequent keynote speaker and contributor to nonprofit journals.  Jan has been named eight times as one of the "Fifty Most Influential People" in the nonprofit sector nationwide, and in 2005 she was named “California Community Leader of the Year” by Leadership California.