Rupa Balasubramanian is a strategic advisor, working at the intersection of philanthropy, policy advocacy and social movements. Currently she serves as a Vice President at the Pop Culture Collaborative, a philanthropic resource and funder learning community that uses grantmaking, convening, narrative strategy, and research to transform the narrative landscape for marginalized communities. Formerly a Partner at Fundamental, a boutique philanthropic advising firm, Rupa has nearly 20 years of experience managing private and family foundations in Los Angeles, supporting organizations focused on education, women’s health, the environment, civic engagement, and civil rights. Rupa worked with Barbra Streisand and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to create the Women’s Heart Alliance, a national non-profit organization aimed at increasing the awareness of women’s heart disease and advocate for gender-specific research. She serves on the board of directors of Vote.org and Planned Parenthood Los Angeles. Rupa previously worked in crisis management at Hill & Knowlton, Inc., a leading international communications firm. During the Clinton Administration, Rupa worked in the Press Secretary’s office at the White House. She graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara and earned her Masters degree in Public Administration at the University of Southern California’s School of Policy, Planning and Development.
Xav Briggs is an award-winning scholar and educator whose work addresses economic opportunity and inequality, housing and urban development, democracy, and government effectiveness, he is also an experienced leader in government and philanthropy. Xav was a senior policy official in the Obama White House, a faculty member at Harvard and later the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and most recently vice president of the Ford Foundation. He serves on the boards of the Global Impact Investing Network, Just Capital, and the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences and is an elected fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration. His books include The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in America, Democracy as Problem Solving: Civic Capacity in Communities across the Globe, and Moving to Opportunity: The Story of an American Experiment to Fight Ghetto Poverty. Xav earned an engineering degree at Stanford University, an MPA at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and a PhD in sociology and education at Columbia University. He was a Rotary Scholar at the Federal University of Bahia in Brazil