Joel Ackerman

Joel Ackerman joined the board of One Acre Fund in 2008 after retiring as a partner at Warburg Pincus, a leading global private equity firm. Joel spent more than 15 years at Warburg Pincus, most recently as the head of the healthcare services group and a member of the executive management committee. Prior to Warburg Pincus, Joel spent 3 years working at Mercer Management Consulting. He currently sits on the board of directors of Coventry Health Care Inc. and Kindred Healthcare Inc., both publicly traded healthcare service companies. He graduated summa cum laude and phi beta kappa from Columbia University with a BA in physics. He also received an MA in physics from Harvard University.

Walter Scott

Walter Scott is Professor of Management in the Management and Strategy Department at the Kellogg School of Management, where he teaches classes in leadership and board governance of for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. Prior to joining Kellogg, Professor Scott served as a Senior Partner of Lehman Brothers, Associate Director for Economics and Government in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Executive Vice President of The Pillsbury Company, President and CEO of IDS Financial Services (now Ameriprise), and as Chairman and CEO of GrandMet USA (now Diageo). He has served on 15 corporate boards of directors and 20 nonprofit boards of directors. He attended Williams College and Northwestern University for his B.S. degree, and received an M.S degree from the Columbia University School of Business in 1958 after three years in the Navy.

Matt Forti

Matt Forti has been One Acre Fund's Board Chairman since the organization's founding in 2006. Matt has served on several nonprofit boards and consults to nonprofits full-time through his work with the Bridgespan Group, a 501c3 that helps nonprofit and philanthropic leaders develop strategies to achieve breakthrough results. Matt received an MBA with distinction from the Kellogg School of Management, where he received a Dean's Distinguished Service Award and co-chaired Kellogg's Pro Bono Consulting Club. Matt graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Northwestern University with a BA in economics and sociology.

John Wood

John is the founder and executive chairman of Room to Read. He started Room to Read after a fast-paced and distinguished career with Microsoft from 1991 to 1999. He was in charge of marketing and business development teams throughout Asia, including Director of Business Development for the Greater China region and as Director of Marketing for the Asia-Pacific region.

John was selected as the second recipient of the Draper Richards Fellowship, has twice been chosen for the Skoll Foundation award for social entrepreneurship, and has led Room to Read to three consecutive selections for the prestigious "Social Capitalist" by Fast Company magazine and the Monitor Group. In 2004, he was named as one of Time Magazine's "Asian Heroes" - the only non-Asian ever selected to receive this award. He is also the author of Leaving Microsoft to Change the World (Harper Collins; September, 2006).

John is an active public speaker, especially to business audiences, on the subjects of corporate social responsibility and building a world-class non-profit organization. His work has been profiled by Bloomberg Television, CNBC, CNN, Fast Company, Newsweek, The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and USA Today. John holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Northwestern University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Finance from the University of Colorado.

Andrew Youn, Senior Partner / Executive Director

Andrew Youn, Senior Partner / Executive Director, started One Acre Fund in 2006. Andrew graduated from Yale magna cum laude, is a former management consultant, and received his MBA from Kellogg School of Management. Andrew co-founded the program in Kenya, and lives in Western Kenya.

Members Emeritus

Anne Marie Burgoyne

Anne Marie Burgoyne identifies and supports Draper Richards Foundation Fellows. The Draper Richards Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship invests in early-stage nonprofit organizations with start-up funding and technical support. Before joining Draper Richards, Anne Marie was the Executive Director of United Cerebral Palsy of the Golden Gate. Prior, Anne Marie was a Roberts Enterprise Development Fund (REDF) Farber Fellow, managing social enterprise businesses at Community Gatepath, a non-profit that supports adults with developmental disabilities. Currently Anne Marie serves on the Boards of Grassroot Soccer, Build Change, Genocide Intervention Network, One Acre Fund, Living Goods, Mapendo International, Spark, the New Sudan Education Initiative (NESEI) and Agora Parterships; she is on the Advisory Councils of Net Impact and the Stanford Graduate School of Business Alumni Consulting Team and a judge for the Manhattan Institute’s Annual Social Entrepreneurship Award, Social Venture Network’s Innovation Awards and Civic Ventures’ Purpose Prize. Anne Marie received her Master of Business Administration and Public Management Program certificate from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business and was selected by her peers as the recipient of the Ernest C. Arbuckle Award. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and its Wharton School, respectively.

Jason Maga

Jason Maga serves as One Acre Fund's Treasurer, managing financial audits and US financial operations. He was drawn to One Acre Fund due to his travel experiences in developing countries such as South Africa, India, and Vietnam, where he witnessed the paradox of so many poor people who work tirelessly to improve their lives, but who lack the opportunities they need to make those efforts fruitful. In his day job, Jason serves as Senior Officer - Host Railroad Policy at Amtrak in Washington, DC. Jason holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and a B.A. in Economics and Government from the College of William & Mary.

Chris Addy, Bain & Company

Chris Addy joined the fundraising board of One Acre Fund in 2008 after being one of the initial members of the One Acre Fund's Investment Council. Professionally, Chris has been with Bain & Company since 2007 as a management consultant. With Bain, he has worked in the airline, retail, and consumer goods industries. Prior to joining Bain Chris had experience in international development with Counterpart International and in education as a middle school science teacher and outdoor adventure guide. He currently sits on the Board of Directors of the Chicago Child Care Society, the oldest child welfare agency in Illinois. Chris received an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management where he was awarded an Austin Scholarship and the Dean's Distinguished Service Award. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a BS in biology.

Chris Ashley, EnerNOC

Chris works in market development at Enernoc, a clean-technology company focused on demand response and energy efficiency solutions for the electric utility industry.  Prior to joining Enernoc, Chris worked at The Wilderness Society, a conservation organization based in Washington, DC; Chestnut Partners, a boutique investment bank in Boston; and Autocell Laboratories, a wireless technology startup also in Boston.  Chris graduated from Middlebury College with a BA in international politics and economics and received an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management.  

Dave Blanchard, Kellogg School of Management

Dave is currently a Business Designer at IDEO Chicago, where he assists companies in discovering new opportunities for innovation by fusing design and business. Concurrently, he is pursuing an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management and a Masters of Engineering Management from Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering. In 2002, he completed a BS in Entrepreneurship from Babson College in Wellesley, MA. He went on to co-found DiscLive, the first company to offer instantly produced CD's of live concerts, which the New York Times hailed as “Rock’s Best New Souvenir.”  Following the sale of DiscLive, he co-founded an event ticket supply firm where he managed the firm’s investment portfolio, pricing strategies, and organizational structure.  Dave has a passion for impacting developing economies through services and access to capital, and is also a member of Opportunity International’s Board of Governors.

John Brothers, Cuidiu Consulting

John is currently principal at Cuidiu Consulting, an endeavor aimed at assisting national and local non-profits, and federal, state, and local government agencies with program and organizational development. John has nearly twenty years experience in the public sector ranging from homelessness and poverty to child welfare and youth development. He is a highly sought after non-profit consultant who has raised millions of dollars in grants and private donations for non-profit organizations throughout his career. John has been teaching non-profit management on the University level for over 5 years at such highly acclaimed schools as New York University and George Mason University. John gravitated toward non-profit work as a result of his experiences growing up in poverty and homelessness as a child in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is driven by the desire to assist the types of organizations that enabled him to overcome the disadvantages of poverty.

Susan Diamond, Online Video Concepts

Susan Diamond is a leader in the Chicago and Southeast Florida small-business communities. She works in the marketing industry for Online Video Concepts, a firm that provides legal marketing services to law firms. Her current position marks a recent return to the public sector after spending five years with two Washington D.C. based non-profit organizations. Susan led the Midwest constituents of Bread for the World to greater support by addressing the issues of hunger and extreme poverty for the grass-roots advocacy group and policy think-tank. Prior to her work at Bread, she served as Associate Director for AIPAC, a top political lobby whose mission is to strengthen the U.S.-Israel relationship. Ms. Diamond began her career by founding and operating three distinctive businesses; Gold Coast Bows, Call Station and White Diamond Consulting Group. Susan lives in Chicago and West Palm Beach with her husband David.

Taira Hall, Citigroup

Taira Hall joined the board of One Acre Fund in 2006, while completing her MBA at the Kellogg School of Management.  She is currently a Vice President of Strategy for the International Consumer Cards Group at Citigroup, based in New York City.  Prior to her MBA, Taira was a Consultant with Deloitte Consulting.  She received her BA in Economics with Distinction and Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University.

Amy Hsiao, Clorox

Amy works in marketing at The Clorox Company in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she currently manages the Brita water filtration business and partnerships with external companies. Prior to joining Clorox, Amy's experience ranges from strategy consulting, consumer research, to teaching in Japan. Amy graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a BA in cognitive science and received an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management.

Briehan Lynch, Rainforest Alliance

Briehan Lynch is working with the New York team to launch a local chapter of the One Acre Fund.  Currently, Briehan works in development for the Rainforest Alliance, where her responsibilities over the past four years have included the development and launch of a corporate membership program, budget and strategic planning, and most recently a role in the major gifts team .  Prior to her work at the Rainforest Alliance, Briehan worked in institutional giving at Bank Street College of Education and as an intern at City Harvest.  She is excited to use her fundraising experience to help with OAF's efforts.

Bhavan Suri, William Blair and Company

Bhavan is a graduate of Kellogg School of Management and Brown University, and currently is an Analyst at William Blair covering growth technology companies. Bhavan is an entrepreneur who has founded several companies, including Elytics, an enterprise software company that provided Web Analytics solutions to Fortune 100 companies. Prior to Elytics, Bhavan was a Director at Answerthink where he was responsible for delivering products and services to the software, financial services, and telecommunications industries. Bhavan has also worked in venture capital and early stage technology commercialization at OCA Ventures and the RPX Group. He is on the Board of Advisors of Next Step Technologies, CoboTech Inc., the Aspire Group, and the One Acre Fund.

James Wesner, Marquette Associates

Jamie joined the OAF Board in 2007 after returning from working with organization for several months in Kenya.  Currently Jamie is an investment consultant with Marquette Associates in Chicago.  He graduated from the University of Notre Dame and received his MBA with Distinction from the Kellogg School of Management. 

Paul Wormley, Hadley Capital

Paul is a general partner at Hadley Capital, a Chicago-based private equity firm. Previously, he was a Principal at Advent International, a global private equity firm, and worked at A.G. Edwards Capital, the private equity subsidiary of A.G. Edwards & Sons. He has an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a BS from the University of Colorado at Boulder. In addition to his role on the One Acre Fund fundraising board, Paul is the Chairman of the auxiliary board of the Chicago chapter of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship. Paul and his family reside in Chicago, IL.

John Yi, Crowson Technology, LLC

John Yi is a serial entrepreneur who looks very forward to the day when he has one "job." Subsequent to a seven year career as a military officer, having served primarily in US Army Special Operations, he worked as a Disaster Director for the American Red Cross, co-founded Crowson Technology, LLC, a home theater and lab technology company, co-founded dublit.com, a publishing and distribution platform for literary podcasts, and now concurrently is a Media Strategist for Affinity Labs, a subsidiary of Monster Worldwide. In his spare time he runs a private consultancy on digital marketing, writes, runs, climbs and bikes (not at the same time).

Paul Polak

Paul Polak is the founder of the Colorado-based non-profit International Development Enterprises (IDE) which is dedicated to developing practical solutions that harness the power of markets and attack poverty at its roots. IDE presently operates in 12 countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, benefitting over 3.8 million farm families since 1982. Additionally, two financially independent affiliate organizations in India and Myanmar began as IDE country programs and continue to have close ties with the organization. Paul’s newest projects include D-Rev and Windhorse International. D-Rev is a non-profit that seeks “to create a design revolution by enlisting the best designers in the world to develop products and ideas that will benefit the 90% of the people on earth who are poor, in order to help them earn their way out of poverty.” D-Rev seeks to do this by inspiring, educating, and connecting all of the people who are involved in the design process, from the inception to the purchase and use of products. Windhorse International’s mission is to create a revolution in big business by demonstrating that a private company can earn attractive profits by serving at least a 100 million customers who live on less than $2 a day and making attractive profits doing it. Polak is also the author of Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail.

Martin Fisher

Martin Fisher co-founded KickStart-International after working in Kenya for 6 years, including 5 years with ActionAid. KickStart designs affordable moneymaking tools and mass-markets them to poor entrepreneurs and farmers, who buy the equipment and use it to establish highly profitable family businesses. As of March 31st, 2010, local entrepreneurs and farmers have used KickStart equipment to start over 95,000 highly profitable local businesses, generating over $95 million dollars per year in new profits and wages. Fisher has won numerous awards and recognition for his inventions and work as a social entrepreneur, including the IDEA Design Gold Medal, TIME Magazine's 2003 European Hero award, 2005 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, and the Schwab Foundation's "2003 Social Entrepreneur of the Year" award. In 2008 he was named Engineer of the Year by Design News magazine and received the prestigious $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability for his achievements in transforming the lives of hundreds of thousands of poor Africans though invention and innovation. Fisher earned his B.S. in mechanical engineering from Cornell University, followed by an M.S. and Ph.D. in mechanical design and theoretical and applied mechanics from Stanford University.

Bruce McNamer

Bruce McNamer is currently the CEO of TechnoServe, a non-profit that provides thousands of entrepreneurs in over 30 developing countries with business advice and access to capital and markets. Prior to TechnoServe, Bruce McNamer's career spanned the public and private sectors, including senior executive/founder positions in several start-ups, investment banking, and management consulting at McKinsey & Company.

Bo Cutter

Bowman Cutter is currently the Chairman of the Board of the global development organization CARE. He is also a founder and current chairman of MicroVest, a leading global microfinance fund with assets under management now in excess of $100 million, and a member of the governing council of the IFMR Trust, an organization focused on market-based solutions to severe poverty in India. Bowman Cutter has been a managing director of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm headquartered in New York City, since 1996 and has held several senior economic policy roles including director of the National Economic Council during the Clinton Administration. Mr. Cutter holds degrees from Harvard University, the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations

Matt Paull

Matthew Paull, has been a director of Best Buy, Inc. since September 2003. Mr. Paull is the former corporate senior executive vice president and chief financial officer for McDonald's Corporation. He also serves on the advisory board of Pershing Square Capital Management, a New York-based hedge fund. Mr. Paull contributes expansive professional experience, financial acumen, knowledge of hedge funds and investments, broad experience in global operations and extensive experience in tax matters to our board.

J. Brian Atwood

Prior to becoming dean of the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs in October 2002, J. Brian Atwood served for six years as Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) during the Clinton Administration. Previously, he was dean of Professional Studies and Academic Affairs at the Foreign Service Institute and the first president of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs. Atwood also served on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's Panel on Peace Operations. He writes and speaks frequently on international development, post-conflict reconstruction, foreign policy, the role of the United Nations and other multilateral organizations in international affairs, and the United States' role in the world order.