Our Team

Board of
directors

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  Board Member

  Yordanos Eyoel

  With experiences across four continents, Yordanos Eyoel is an Ethiopian-American democracy entrepreneur who is the Founder and CEO of Keseb.

  Keseb is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization building an ecosystem for cross-country learning, collaboration and innovation to counter authoritarianism and advance inclusive and resilient democracies. For launching Keseb in 2022, Yordanos was recognized with the “Extraordinary Leader Transforming a Field” award by Unorthodox Philanthropy.

  Previously, Yordanos was a Managing Partner at New Profit, where she was the first person in the organization’s 22-year history to grow from Portfolio Analyst to Managing Partner. As Managing Partner, she expanded New Profit’s early-stage portfolio by 3x in 4 years, supporting ~100 early-stage organizations, 80% led by people of color. In 2019, Yordanos founded New Profit's Civic Lab, the first nonpartisan venture philanthropy initiative in the U.S. to invest in innovative solutions building civic trust and a strong civic culture in America.

  Yordanos is a Civil Society Fellow of the ADL & the Aspen Institute and a former Visiting Fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. In 2017, Yordanos co-founded and served as the International Spokesperson of the Sister March Network that mobilized over 4 million people for the 2017 Women’s March. Yordanos serves as the Board Chair of PushBlack, the largest nonprofit media organization for Black Americans. Yordanos’ work and writing has been featured in Fast Company, Stanford Social Innovation Review, WBUR/NPR, and We the Possibility by Harvard Business Review, among others. In 2019, Yordanos delivered the TEDx talk "Why Voting isn't Enough" to inspire expansive and on-going civic engagement.

  Yordanos holds a B.A. in Economics and Political Science, Honors, Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Florida, where she was inducted into the University Hall of Fame. She also holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School. Yordanos is the 2020 recipient of the City of Boston Spark Impact Award for Activism and Issue Advocacy.

  

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  Board Member

  Fran Scarlett

  Fran Scarlett is a business strategist, consultant and coach who is passionate about building sustainable entrepreneurial organizations. She is the founder of Scarlett Ink & Associates, a strategy consultancy focused on media. Scarlett has worked with companies of all sizes and has started and operated two publications targeted to women and other underrepresented audiences. She also has worked with entrepreneurial and established companies across multiple industries. Recently she served as chief knowledge officer at the Institute for Nonprofit News, a network of 400+ nonprofit, mostly digital newsrooms where she oversaw the network’s capacity-building programs in revenue generation, business strategy, leadership development and organizational equity.

  Scarlett is an alum, a coach and faculty member of the Media Transformation Challenge housed at Poynter Institute. She also coached in the Knight-Lenfest Table Stakes program at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

  Scarlett is also a member of Blue Engine Collaborative, a consortium of consultants and advisors to media companies, startups, foundations, academia, and others, on revenue and audience growth, product development, consumer user experience and digital strategy. Scarlett coaches in the Meta Accelerator program, the Google News Initiative Sponsorship Lab, the Center for Public Broadcasting Digital Transformation Program and Borealis Philanthropy Racial Equity in Journalism program.

  Scarlett serves on the boards of DREAMS of Wilmington- a youth development through the arts program and the NC Local News Workshop. She is also on the advisory boards of the Pivot Fund and the GNI Global Sustainability Study. She has served on multiple nonprofit boards and is a presenter at industry conferences and workshops across the globe.

  Scarlett has a B.S. in Mass Communications from Boston University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She is an avid gardener and traveler and has achieved her goal of visiting all seven continents.

  

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  Board Member

  Rachel Winston

  Rachel E. Winston is an archivist, curator, and Black memory worker based out of Austin, TX. She is the founding Black Diaspora Archivist at The University of Texas at Austin, and leads the university’s effort to build a special collection documenting the Black experience across the Americas and Caribbean.

  Rachel is currently a Council Member for the Society of American Archivists, and a Mellon Cultural Heritage Fellow at the Rare Book School. Her recent curatorial work and publications have been featured by the George Washington Carver Museum and Cultural Complex, the City of Austin, Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory (2021), and Change is Required: Preparing for the Post-Pandemic Museum (2022). She is an alumna of Davidson College, the Coro Fellows Program in Public Affairs, and The University of Texas at Austin.