Gisel Kordestani is a founding member of The Leadership Now Project since 2017 and sits on the Investors Committee, the Steering Committee and is co-chair of the California committee of members. Gisel has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations since 2016.In 2023, Gisel recently stepped off the board of Mercy Corps, a large global humanitarian aid organization engaged in transitional environments that have experienced natural disaster, economic collapse, or violent conflict. She was on the board for 9 years and was chairman of the board for 3 years during a transformational time which included a full strategy review and turning over the leadership team so that Mercy Corps’ global team of humanitarians work together effectively on the front lines of today’s biggest crises.Gisel is a tech entrepreneur who has worked in early stage startups, management consulting and spent over 8 years at Google in senior global roles in finance and new business development. In 2013, she left Google and co-founded Crowdpac, a venture-backed, crowdfunding site for politics that empowers small dollar donors and helps thousands of candidates run for office. Crowdpac was sold in late 2019 and it’s still impacting elections today by making politics simple.Gisel has been working on developing tech sectors in fragile environments across Africa and the Middle East for two decades. She has worked for 15 years in the West Bank and Gaza where she is an advisory board member of GazaSkyGeeks, a tech accelerator and coding academy that she created while at Google. She is also a producer of two films Under Siege and The Idol, both about Gaza.Gisel holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and an undergraduate degree in international affairs from the American University in Paris.