Megan Kashner

Professor Megan Kashner serves as the Director of Social Impact at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. In her leadership of Kellogg's Social Impact offerings, Kashner focuses on the areas of impact investing, social entrepreneurship, sustainability, nonprofit management, policy, global development, values and ethics. Kashner leads up the global Impact & Sustainable Finance Faculty Consortium, the Kellogg-Morgan Stanley Sustainable Investing Challenge, and more collaborative work at the intersection of markets and impact.

Kashner is additionally the co-founder of Colorful Capital a new VC firm founded to focus investment and opportunity on ventures led by LGBTQ+ community members. The Colorful Capital approach is designed to invest in scalable, early-stage, venture-backable enterprises launched and led by LGBTQ+ founders whose potential and investability have been routinely underestimated by mainstream capital providers. The Colorful Capital concept stems from groundwork research by Professor Megan Kashner and student Martín de Leon, published in the whitepaper, entitled Barriers & Exclusions: A baseline study on the LGBTQ+ Experience in Venture Funding.

Previously, Kashner held leadership roles as a CEO, social entrepreneur, and consultant. In her early career, Kashner dedicated herself to direct service with families and individuals in a variety of social service settings. Kashner holds an MBA from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, a Master's from the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration and a B.A. in Public Policy from Brown University.