Directors

Paul Sagan, Chair

Paul Sagan is a former award-winning journalist and an internet technology entrepreneur who now advises organizations on strategy and execution. He works primarily as a board member of public and private businesses. Sagan is an executive in residence (XIR), Catalyst Partners, the venture capital firm where he was previously a managing director.

Sagan was elected chair of our board effective Jan. 1, 2017, succeeding the late Herbert Sandler, our founding chair.

Sagan is also a director of one public company, Moderna Inc., and he serves on the boards of several private businesses. In addition, he is a director of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center of Boston, and he is a life trustee of Northwestern University, where he graduated with a degree in journalism.

Earlier in his career, Sagan worked at Akamai Technologies Inc., the MIT spin-out company he joined as employee No. 15 and chief operating officer in 1998, and then became its president in 1999, and CEO and board member in 2005. He served as chief executive through 2012 and as a director, including as executive vice chairman, until 2019.

Sagan began his career in broadcast television news. He joined WCBS-TV in 1981 as a news writer and was named news director in 1987.

When he left CBS in 1991, Sagan joined Time Warner and held several executive positions until 1997, including senior vice president of cable programming to design and launch NY1 News, the cable news network based in New York City; and president and editor of new media at Time Inc., a division of Time Warner. He was a senior member of the team responsible for the development of many of the company’s early online businesses. At Time Warner, Sagan was a founder of Road Runner, the world’s first broadband cable modem service, and Pathfinder, one of the early web properties that pioneered internet advertising.

President Barack Obama appointed Sagan to the President’s National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee in 2010, and he served until January 2017. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker appointed Sagan to chair the commonwealth’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education from 2015 until 2019.

Sagan is a three-time Emmy Award winner for broadcast journalism in New York; a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2008; and the 2009 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in the technology category. Sagan was also a member of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.

Claire Bernard

Claire Bernard is the President of the Mariposa Foundation, a private family foundation. She oversees grant making and operations, supervises the endowment’s investments, and is a Mariposa trustee. The foundation gives anonymously, concentrating on humanitarian, environmental, and New York City organizations. Claire’s dedication to better serving grantees has led her to conduct site visits around the world, including such places as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Kenya, Bangladesh, Liberia, and Colombia. Nationally, she has worked closely with those affected by Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and Hurricane Sandy. Claire speaks and writes about the nonprofit world and has written for Vogue, The Huffington Post, and Vanity Fair, where she had a column on vanityfair.com sharing 1-Click tips of how readers can get involved and detailing her visits to mountaintop mining removal sites in Virginia, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill site, and lobbying in D.C.

Claire has been a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) since 2013, where she chairs the Development committee and serves on the Executive, Finance, Investment, and Governance and Nominating committees. She has also served on International Rescue Committee's Children's Committee, the Global Fund for Women's Philanthropy Committee, the advisory board of Narrative Magazine, the Friends Committee of New Yorkers for Children, and most recently as an Oxfam GB Ambassador and their Programme Review Board.

Claire received a BA with honors from Brown University and holds an MFA in writing from Columbia University.

Tomiko Brown-Nagin

Tomiko Brown-Nagin is dean of Harvard Radcliffe Institute, one of the world’s leading centers for interdisciplinary research across the humanities, sciences, social sciences, arts and professions. She is also the Daniel P.S. Paul professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and a professor of history in the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

An award-winning legal historian and an expert in constitutional law, she is the author of groundbreaking scholarship. Brown-Nagin’s book “Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality” (Pantheon, 2022) explores the life and times of the pathbreaking lawyer, politician and judge, and it garnered widespread praise. The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, the Smithsonian Magazine and Time all cited it as one of the best books of 2022. And “Civil Rights Queen” won several prizes, including the 2023 Order of the Coif Book Award, the 2023 Darlene Clark Hine Award and the 2023 Lillian Smith Book Award. Her previous book, “Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement” (Oxford University Press, 2011), won a 2012 Bancroft Prize in American History, the Liberty Legacy Prize of the Organization of American Historians and the John Phillip Reid Book Award by the American Society of Legal History, among other honors.

In addition, Brown-Nagin’s scholarship and commentary on the Supreme Court’s equal protection jurisprudence, civil rights law and history, and education reform have been published in the Yale Law Journal, the Duke Law Journal, Law & History Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, the Washington Post and POLITICO Magazine, among other publications.

From 2019-22, Brown-Nagin chaired the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. As chair, she led the highly visible university-wide initiative and co-authored the committee’s landmark report detailing Harvard’s direct, financial and intellectual ties to slavery. Lauded in the Post and The New York Review of Books for its scholarly breadth and depth, the report was nominated for several academic prizes.

Brown-Nagin has served as dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute since 2018. During her tenure, she has helped recruit excellent faculty to Harvard, expanded Radcliffe’s renowned fellowship program to academics and artists from a broad array of backgrounds and institutional affiliations, increased student engagement and built partnerships with community-based organizations.

Mark Colodny

Mark M. Colodny is the co-head of U.S. private equity, the head of the Technology Group and a member of the Executive Management Group of Warburg Pincus.

Colodny began his career at Fortune magazine, where he was a journalist. Prior to joining Warburg Pincus in 2001, Colodny served as senior vice president of corporate development at Primedia from 1995 to 2000, where he ran the Mergers and Acquisitions Group. Colodny is a member of the board of directors of Internet Brands, Helix, ProPublica and The City, and he is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Colodny received a B.A. from Harvard College, an MBA from Harvard Business School and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Steve Daetz

Steve Daetz is president of the Sandler Foundation, where he has overseen grantmaking and operations since 2007. He previously was vice president and deputy general counsel at a Fortune 500 company, advising the board and senior management on corporate and securities matters, regulatory compliance and public policy issues. He began his career at the Cooley law firm in San Francisco, representing companies and venture investors in strategic and financing transactions. A Bay Area native, Daetz received a J.D. from Berkeley Law, a masters from the London School of Economics as a Rotary Foundation scholar and a B.A. magna cum laude from UCLA. He serves on the boards of several nonprofit organizations.

Angela Filo

Angela Filo is the co-founder of Skyline Foundation, a family foundation that funds local, national and global organizations addressing problems at their roots and shifting systems toward a more equitable and just future. Skyline works in four program areas: climate solutions, just democracy, equity in education and birth justice. The foundation seeks to create lasting partnerships with grantees that align with the principles of trust-based philanthropy and the time horizon needed to create and sustain change.

Filo is a member of the advisory board of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and is a former board member of the Student Press Law Center. She is a trustee for Stanford University, where she also serves on the advisory boards of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and the Haas Center for Public Service. She was co-chair of the American Civil Liberties Union’s national Centennial Campaign. Earlier in her career, Filo taught high school journalism and photography, exhibited her photography projects, created public artworks and worked for publishing and nonprofit organizations. She holds an undergraduate degree from Stanford and a master’s degree in journalism from UC Berkeley.

Anu Khosla

Anu Khosla is a brand strategist and next generation philanthropist who marries analytical thinking and science literacy with empathy-driven decision making to drive social impact. Anu is committed to addressing inequality and strengthening civil society through her work. She holds a BA in Human Biology with a concentration in Global and Public Health from Stanford University and a MPS in Branding from the School of Visual Arts, where she was a recipient of the 2016 Paula Rhodes Memorial Award for Exceptional Achievement in Branding.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University. Emmy Award-winning filmmaker, literary scholar, journalist, cultural critic, and institution builder, Professor Gates has authored or co-authored twenty-four books and created twenty documentary films, including Wonders of the African World, African American Lives, Faces of America, Black in Latin America, Black America since MLK: And Still I Rise, Africa’s Great Civilizations, and Finding Your Roots, his groundbreaking genealogy series now in its fifth season on PBS. His six-part PBS documentary series, The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross (2013), which he wrote, executive produced, and hosted, earned the Emmy Award for Outstanding Historical Program—Long Form, as well as the Peabody Award, Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, and NAACP Image Award. Professor Gates’s latest project is the history series, Reconstruction: America after the Civil War (PBS, 2019), and the related books, Dark Sky Rising: Reconstruction and the Dawn of Jim Crow, with Tonya Bolden (Scholastic, 2019), and Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow (Penguin Random House, 2019).

Having written for such leading publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times, and Time, Professor Gates serves as chairman of TheRoot.com, a daily online magazine he co-founded in 2008, and chair of the Creative Board of FUSION TV. He oversees the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field, and has received grant funding to develop a Finding Your Roots curriculum to teach students science through genetics and genealogy. In 2012, The Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader, a collection of his writings edited by Abby Wolf, was published.

The recipient of fifty-five honorary degrees and numerous prizes, Professor Gates was a member of the first class awarded “genius grants” by the MacArthur Foundation in 1981, and in 1998, he became the first African American scholar to be awarded the National Humanities Medal. He was named to Time’s 25 Most Influential Americans list in 1997, to Ebony’s Power 150 list in 2009, and to Ebony’s Power 100 list in 2010 and 2012. He earned his B.A. in English Language and Literature, summa cum laude, from Yale University in 1973, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English Literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge in 1979. In 2018, he was one of 15 alumni of African descent honored in the exhibition, Black Cantabs: History Makers, at the Cambridge University Library. Professor Gates has directed the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research—now the Hutchins Center—since arriving at Harvard in 1991, and during his first fifteen years on campus, he chaired the Department of Afro-American Studies as it expanded into the Department of African and African American Studies with a full-fledged doctoral program. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and serves on a wide array of boards, including the New York Public Library, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Aspen Institute, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Library of America, and the Brookings Institution. In 2017, the Organization of American States named Gates a Goodwill Ambassador for the Rights of People of African Descent in the Americas.

Carrie Lozano

Carrie Lozano is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, journalist and media executive. She is currently president and CEO of ITVS, public media’s leading incubator and co-producer of independent film, and presenter of the series “Independent Lens.”

Prior to ITVS, she was director of the Sundance Institute’s Documentary Film and Artist Programs, which serves hundreds of filmmakers each year with funding, labs, fellowships and intensive artist support. She previously launched and directed the International Documentary Association’s Enterprise Documentary Fund, where she supported filmmakers with funds and professional development on projects at the intersection of documentary and journalism, including “Welcome To Chechnya,” “A Thousand Cuts,” “Through the Night,” “Always In Season” and “One Child Nation.”

Lozano was also a documentary executive at Al Jazeera America and a senior producer of the network’s investigative series “Fault Lines,” where her team garnered numerous honors including an Emmy, a Peabody and several Headliner Awards.

Among other work, Lozano led BAVC Media’s MediaMaker Fellowship and was a lecturer in the Documentary Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She produced the Academy Award-nominated documentary “The Weather Underground,” the live-cinema piece “Utopia In Four Movements” and produced, directed and edited the Teddy Award nominee “Reporter Zero.” Her most recent film, the 2016 documentary “The Ballad of Fred Hersch,” is a portrait of one of today’s foremost jazz pianists. In addition to serving on ProPublica’s board of directors, Lozano serves on the advisory boards of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and PBS Frontline, and she is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Claire Hoffman

Claire Hoffman is the author of the reported memoir “Greetings from Utopia Park.” As a journalist, she has written for many magazines about culture, religion, celebrity, business and more. A former staff reporter for the Los Angeles Times and Rolling Stone, she holds an M.A. in religion from the University of Chicago, an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University and an MFA from New York University. She sits on the board of the Goldhirsh Foundation, as well as the Columbia Journalism School and the Brooklyn Public Library.

Katie McGrath

Katie McGrath is Co-CEO and Chief Strategy Officer at Bad Robot Productions. She oversees the company’s corporate culture, philanthropy, communications and ancillary businesses. Prior to joining Bad Robot, Katie was a founding Partner at First Tuesday Media, a political media firm based in Los Angeles. Earlier, she served as Director of Communications at MTV Networks and as Vice President at the strategic communications consulting firm Robinson Lerer Sawyer Miller. Katie began her professional career in Washington, D.C. as a legislative assistant to Senator Edward M. Kennedy. Katie and her husband, JJ Abrams, and three children live in Los Angeles.

Bobby Monks

Robert C.S. Monks is a serial entrepreneur and real estate developer who has founded, led and grown 19 businesses in the financial services, real estate, technology and communication sectors. He is highly regarded for creating strategic partnerships that promote shared ownership and tether profitability to economic and social development in communities across the country. Monks is a proponent of the belief that active ownership is the key to successful ventures.

In 2011, Monks became an owner and chairman of Spinnaker Trust, a Maine-based trust company managing over $1 billion in assets. Spinnaker Trust provides personalized and integrated financial services primarily to high-net-worth families, individuals and private foundations. Spinnaker Trust’s mission is to deliver first-class stewardship and wealth enhancement strategies with a global perspective.

From 2001 to 2007, Monks was chairman of Institutional Shareholder Services, the world’s leading provider of proxy voting and corporate governance services. With more than 1,000 institutional and corporate clients, the company analyzes proxies and produces research and objective vote recommendations and handles electronic voting for more than 28,000 companies across 102 markets worldwide.

Monks previously served on the boards of Maine Today Media, T3i, Mediant Communications, Maine Fiber Company, Spinnaker Trust and the Black Point Corporation. He is also a founder and owner of the Eagle Point Companies, Dirigo Management Company, Monks O’Neil Development, The Signal Group, Maine Workforce Housing and Headwater Capital Management. He was previously a founder and director of Atlantic Bank.

Monks serves and has served on many nonprofit boards including Maine Center for Creativity, University of Southern Maine School of Business, Maine for Obama Steering and Finance Committee, Gulf of Maine Research Institute, Natural Resources Council of Maine, Maine Employers Mutual Insurance Company, Children’s Museum of Maine, Spurwink Foundation, Waynflete School and the Portland Performing Arts Center.

Monks presently serves on the Maine Center Ventures board and previously was the co-chair of the campaign to relocate the Maine Law School to a beautiful new location in the heart of downtown Portland.

James M. Stone

James M. Stone was educated in the public schools of Pelham, New York, and at Harvard University. At Harvard, he received the Allyn Young Prize for the best undergraduate economics thesis and the Goldsmith Prize for the best research paper presented to the graduate school in economics. He graduated with highest honors in economics and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in 1969. Stone received his Ph.D. in economics in 1973 and was appointed lecturer in economics by the Harvard faculty, teaching a course on the economics of securities markets.

In 1975, Stone was appointed by Gov. Michael Dukakis to be the commissioner of insurance for Massachusetts. Stone served in that position for four years. Stone was appointed chairman of the United States Commodity Futures Trading Commission by President Jimmy Carter in 1979. The CFTC is the federal agency vested with principal regulatory jurisdiction over derivatives trading in financial instruments and physical commodities.

In 1983, Stone concluded his term in Washington and returned to Boston, where he founded The Plymouth Rock Company. He currently serves as CEO of the Plymouth Rock group of insurance companies, with automobile and homeowners premium writings in excess of $2 billion annually. Mr. Stone was a co-founder of Cat Limited, a Bermuda-based reinsurer; a founder of Homesite Group, which writes home insurance nationally with annual premiums of over $3 billion; and a founder of Response Insurance, a direct-to-the-consumer auto insurer. He is also a founding member of the Administrative Committee of Lindsay Goldberg, a New York-based private equity investment firm.

Stone served on the board of directors of The Boston Globe Newspaper Corporation from 1998 to 2006, and from 2012 to 2015 he was vice chairman of Global Post, a web-based international news service. Stone served for 10 years as a director and chairman of the board of Management Sciences for Health, a leading provider of humanitarian health infrastructure support in over 40 countries around the world. He is the chairman of the Education and Commercial Relations Committees of the board of directors of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a nonprofit genetics institute; and he is the chairman of the School on the Move prize panel, which provides an annual cash award to the most improved Boston public school.

Stone is the author of “Five Easy Theses” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016) and an earlier book on the securities industry, as well as numerous articles on insurance, finance and economics. He has served as an adviser to governments in three developing countries. Stone is married, with two children, and lives in Boston. He is a member of the Finance Committee and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as a member of the governing trust of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Charles Whitaker

Charles Whitaker is the dean of Northwestern University Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications. Whitaker joined the Medill faculty in 1992 and most recently served as the Helen Gurley Brown professor and associate dean of journalism for the school. He previously directed the Academy for Alternative Journalism in an effort to address the field’s lack of diversity.

Before joining the Medill faculty, Whitaker was a senior editor at Ebony magazine, where he covered a wide range of cultural, social and political issues and events on four continents, including two U.S. presidential campaigns and the installation of the first black members of the British Parliament. He began his journalism career as a newspaper reporter at the Miami Herald and the Louisville (Kentucky) Times. In addition, he served as an editorial consultant to Catalyst Chicago, a publication dedicated to coverage of public schools in the city, and as president of the editorial board of the Chicago Reporter, an acclaimed investigative publication that covers issues of race and class.

He serves on the board of directors for numerous professional organizations, including the American Society of Magazine Editors. He also serves on the advisory boards for the Prison Journalism Project, the Evanston RoundTable and Block Club Chicago.

Paul Steiger, Founder Emeritus

Paul E. Steiger was the founding editor-in-chief, CEO and president of ProPublica from 2008 through 2012, and part-time executive chairman from 2013 through 2020.

Steiger served as the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal from 1991 to 2007. During his tenure, members of the Journal’s newsroom staff were awarded 16 Pulitzer Prizes. In addition, ProPublica reporters received Pulitzer Prizes in May 2010 and 2011.

He is a senior adviser to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, based in Arlington, Virginia, which provides free legal assistance to journalists. He was a trustee of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, based in Miami, that funds efforts to enhance journalism and the functioning of American communities. He is a board member and treasurer of the Global Editors Network, based in Paris. From 1999 to 2007, he was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board, serving as its chairman in his final year. For six years, from June 2005 to June 2011, Steiger was the chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based nonprofit that advocates for press freedom around the globe.

Awards include the Columbia Journalism Award, the University of Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism, the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center, the Gerald Loeb Award for lifetime achievement from the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, the William Allen White National Citation from the University of Kansas's White School of Journalism and Mass Communications, the University of Arizona's John Peter and Anna Catherine Zenger Award, the Dean’s Medal for Distinguished Leadership from Brandeis University, the Fourth Estate Award from the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the National Press Foundation’s George Beveridge Editor of the Year Award, the Decade of Excellence Award from the World Leadership Forum in London, the Freedom of the Press Award from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the American Society of News Editors Leadership Award.

Steiger worked for 15 years as a reporter, the Washington economics correspondent, and the business editor for the Los Angeles Times, and for 26 years as a reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale University in 1964. In 2013 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by Columbia University.

In Memoriam

Herbert Sandler, Founding Chairman

Mr. Sandler and his late wife, Marion, founded Golden West Financial Corporation in 1963. They were Golden West’s chief executive officers and chairmen of the board from 1963 until 2006, when the company was sold to Wachovia Corporation. Under the Sandlers’ leadership, Golden West became the second-largest thrift institution in the United States and was considered to be one of the best managed financial institutions in the country by many industry observers. Fortune magazine ranked Golden West as the nation’s most admired mortgage services company, and on seven separate occasions named Golden West America’s most admired savings institution. Morningstar, a leading provider of investment research, named the Sandlers CEOs of the Year in 2004. Mr. Sandler was president of the Sandler Foundation.

Journalism Advisory Board

Jill Abramson, Former Executive Editor, The New York Times

David Boardman, Dean, Temple University School of Media and Communications

Raymond T. Bonner, writer living in London

Robert A. Caro, historian and biographer of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson

Sheila Coronel, Director, Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism, Columbia Journalism School

L. Gordon Crovitz, Former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, partner, Journalism Online

David Gergen, Professor of public service, Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and director of its Center for Public Leadership

Tom Goldstein, Director, Media Studies Program, University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

Isaac Lee, Executive Chairman, Exile Content Studio

Shawn McIntosh, Public Editor, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Priscilla Painton, Executive Editor, Non-fiction, Simon & Schuster

David Shribman, Executive Editor Emeritus, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Allan Sloan, Senior Editor at Large, Fortune magazine

Kerry Smith, Senior Vice President for Editorial Quality, ABC News

Cynthia A. Tucker, Columnist, Universal Press Syndicate

Impact Circle Advisory Council

Mark Colodny, Chair, Managing Director, Warburg Pincus LLC

Tim Andrews, President & CEO, Advertising Specialty Institute

Dror Bar-Ziv, Managing Partner, Blue Sparrow Partners

Ann Blinkhorn, Founder, Blinkhorn LLC

William Gee, Director, Manaaki Foundation

Maria Gotsch, President and CEO, Partnership Fund for New York City

William Pollak, CEO, Gordian Group

Hugh Rogovy, Founder and President, The Rogovy Foundation