Nancy Roob Email & Phone Number

Co-founder and lead architect of Blue Meridian Partners, an innovative new model for finding and funding scalable solutions to the problems that trap young people and families in poverty in the US. Through Blue Meridian, results-oriented philanthropists pool their resources to unlock unprecedented sums of capital for social sector leaders seeking to rapidly scale up strategies, programs and interventions that boost economic mobility for millions of low-income Americans.Blue Meridian’s model builds on Nancy’s work at the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (EMCF), where she played a major role in developing the foundation’s grantmaking strategy of making large, long-term investments in nonprofits eager to expand evidence-based programs lifting the life prospects of America’s most disadvantaged youth.At EMCF, she also pioneered a form of coordinated, collaborative investment called growth capital aggregation, which in eight years leveraged $155 million of EMCF’s capital to help 16 grantees secure $487 million in additional private and public funding. The launch of Blue Meridian Partners in 2016 opened a new chapter of this aggregated investment approach. (Nancy Roob and board chair Stan Druckenmiller discussed the formation of Blue Meridian Partners in an interview with the Nonprofit Quarterly.) In 2017, Nancy spoke to at TedXPennsyvaniaAve about her hope that Blue Meridian’s performance-based investing approach could help revolutionize how funders back social sector leaders and lead to “a new normal” for philanthropy. In 2019, she led Blue Meridian in becoming an independent organization.Nancy is a trustee of EMCF and continues to serve as its President and CEO, as the Foundation pursues a limited-life strategy over the next decade. Before becoming president in 2005, she was its Vice President and COO, as well as Director of the Program for New York Neighborhoods, which launched community-building and neighborhood-stabilization projects in the South Bronx and Central Harlem. One of these projects evolved into the Harlem Children’s Zone, whose success has inspired legislation to create “Promise Neighborhoods” throughout the nation.Nancy is a graduate and trustee of Hamilton College, and holds a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. She lives in New York City with her husband and her two children.