Christine Heenan

Christine Heenan serves as Flagship’s senior partner and chief communications officer, overseeing communications, external affairs, brand and marketing for Flagship and its enterprise companies. She also serves as an advisor the dozens of Flagship-founded companies in its broader ecosystem. She is the founder and former president of Clarendon Group, a consulting firm focused on social impact, communications, advocacy, and leadership voice. While at Clarendon she advised clients including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Broad Institute, the Whitehead Institute, the Social Science Research Council, CARE USA, University of Miami, the Rockefeller Family Office, philanthropist Donald Sussman, and other notable organizations, leaders, and philanthropists.

She served as Senior Vice President for Global Policy & Advocacy at The Rockefeller Foundation, where she led the Foundation’s policy, program influence, partnerships, and communications teams, as well as its regional teams in Asia, Africa and Italy. She also oversaw the Bellagio and Fellows unit.  While at Rockefeller, she led the creation of #Solvable, a global platform for highlighting the UN Sustainable Development Goals featuring more than 45 mini-films, an acclaimed podcast, and an award-winning documentary film. She also helped conceive and launch the “Without Mom” campaign, a multi-country effort to raise awareness for preventable maternal mortality launched during Mom Congress on Capitol Hill in 2019.

From 2008 to 2015, Heenan was Vice President of Public Affairs and Communications for Harvard University, overseeing its communications, government relations, and digital strategy teams in Cambridge, Boston, and Washington, DC. During the Clinton Administration she served in the White House as a Senior Policy Analyst and speechwriter, focused primarily on health care policy, women’s issues, and other areas of domestic policy.

Heenan was an adjunct assistant professor of public policy at the Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions at Brown University and a Freshman Seminar instructor at Harvard College, teaching on communications in policy making. In 2010, Heenan was awarded a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching from the Derek Bok Center at Harvard. She was previously a Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center, and now serves as Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School, where she is part of the teaching team for a new and highly participatory class at HBS called “Conversations on Leadership.”

Heenan began her career in business strategy consulting for Telesis and SJS – spinoffs of Boston Consulting Group – working on business process analysis, cost analysis, market strategy, and strategic planning for national and international corporations including Corning, Rubbermaid, Ahlstrom, and IKEA. She has served on a number of boards focused on child development, education, and economic policy, and now serves on the boards of the David Rockefeller Fund and the University of Rhode Island. She and her family live in New York and Rhode Island.