Trends in Global Philanthropy – Speaker Series
Posted in News Story
Join us for our final fireside chat in our spring series on global philanthropy with Anamitra Deb, Senior Vice President of Programs and Policy at the Omidyar Network, hosted by Sushma Raman, Waldemar A. Nielsen Philanthropy Fellow. The Omidyar Network envisions a future where our shared humanity steers our digital future. The conversation will focus on trends in philanthropy related to recent advancements in artificial intelligence, and the role that private philanthropy can play in harnessing the promise and addressing the perils of new technologies. We will also discuss how grantseekers new to AI can enter the funding space for this technology, and Omidyar’s approach to funding this work.
Speaker Biographies:
Anamitra Deb serves as senior vice president of programs and policy at Omidyar Network. In this role, he oversees the organization’s programmatic and policy strategies in service of Omidyar Network’s mission to envision a future where our shared humanity steers our digital future.
Previously, he was managing director of Responsible Tech, where he built the team that delivered impact across platform accountability and regulation; privacy, data governance, and online trust and safety; better tech cultures and products; responsible and open source tech; and guardrails for emergent tech, such as generative AI. He has been at Omidyar Network since 2013, also serving as global lead of Omidyar Network’s Intellectual Capital team.
Prior to joining Omidyar Network, Anamitra was an associate partner at the Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte), where he co-founded the global Monitor Inclusive Markets practice in 2007 and led multiple engagements for premier philanthropic and global development clients in Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa. As a Rhodes scholar, Anamitra received two master’s degrees from the University of Oxford and is a proud graduate of Mount Allison University and the Lester B Pearson UWC in Canada.
Sushma Raman is the Waldemar A. Nielsen Philanthropy Fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Public and Nonprofit Leadership, housed at the McCourt School of Public Policy. Sushma is a philanthropic and social change strategist with over two decades of experience leading programs and organizations. She has served as the executive director of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights at Harvard Kennedy School, a program officer at the Ford and Open Society Foundations, and President of Southern California Grantmakers. She has taught in graduate public policy schools at Harvard, UCLA, USC, and Tufts Fletcher School.
Speaker Biography
Nancy Lindborg has spent her career focused on issues of democracy, conflict, and humanitarian action. She is currently the president and CEO at The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which awards national and global grants to help build just societies, restore and protect our planet, and improve the lives of children, families, and communities.
From 2015 to 2020, she served as the president and CEO of the U.S. Institute of Peace. From 2010 to 2014, she served as the assistant administrator for the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance (DCHA) at USAID, where she focused on crisis prevention, response, recovery, and transition. She also led response teams for some of the biggest challenges the world was facing at the time, including the crisis in Syria, the droughts in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, the Arab Spring, as well as the Ebola crisis.
Prior to joining USAID, she was president of Mercy Corps, where she spent 14 years helping to grow the organization into a globally respected organization known for innovative programs in the most challenging environments.
Speaker Biography:
Cecilia A. Conrad, Ph.D. is the founding CEO of Lever for Change and a member of its Board of Directors – Ex Officio. Dr. Conrad was formerly a Managing Director at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, where she led the MacArthur Fellows program and steered the cross-Foundation team that created MacArthur’s 100&Change—an athematic, open call competition that periodically makes a single $100 million grant to help solve a critical problem of our time. Before joining the Foundation in January 2013, Conrad had a distinguished career as both a professor of economics and an administrator at Pomona College in Claremont, CA.
Speaker Biography:
Noorain Khan serves as vice president and chief innovation officer, a newly created executive role that will drive the Ford Foundation’s innovation strategy and commitment to accelerating the foundation and the social sector’s impact. Khan joins President Heather Gerken’s executive leadership team, overseeing the foundation’s Mission Investments and Ford Global Fellows programs and the Office of Strategy and Impact to further integrate the foundation’s ongoing findings, learning, and innovation strategies, while leading new initiatives.
Khan previously served at the Ford Foundation in several roles, concluding her nine-year tenure as senior advisor and director to former president Darren Walker. In this prior role, she built and led the first-ever program team to manage the presidential grantmaking budget and launched Ford’s work in disability rights. Under her leadership, Ford became the largest private funder of disability rights worldwide. Due to her extensive contributions to the philanthropic sector, she is the subject of a Harvard Law School case study on public sector leadership.
Khan began her career as an attorney at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York City. A Rhodes Scholar and PD Soros Fellow, she holds a JD from Yale Law School, an MPhil in Migration Studies from Oxford University, and a BA from Rice University.