Jody Cornish

Jody Cornish is a social impact and philanthropic advisor, working at the nexus of social impact strategy, organizational effectiveness and resource aggregation. She currently is the senior vice president of alignment, innovation and investment at City Year, focused on clarifying City Year’s multi-year strategy for impact, aligning operations with strategy and ensuring aggregation of resources to support operations and innovation in key areas. Jody also co-leads education thought leadership for City Year.

In addition to her work at City Year and her service on the YouthBuild Board of Trustees, Jody is a board member for Next Generation Learning Challenge, and Big Picture Learning. Previously, Jody was a managing partner with New Profit – a Boston-based venture philanthropy fund. During her time with New Profit, she worked with the senior leadership team and Board of more than 30 nonprofit organizations to optimize their strategies for growth and impact. During her last five years at New Profit, she was the co-lead for New Profit’s ground-breaking K-12 education fund, Reimagine Learning, which combined work in policy change, investments in leading edge education entrepreneurs, programmatic work in youth voice and in community-informed school change in Essex County, resulting in the convening and engagement of nearly 1,000 education innovators across sectors. This work was featured in a Deloitte whitepaper: Shifting a System: The Reimagine Learning Network and how to tackle persistent problems. Prior to joining New Profit, Jody was the co-founder and lead strategist for Lodestar International, an international development consultancy focused on supporting cross-sector collaboration to address entrenched economic development challenges in the developing world.

Jody previously worked in strategy execution with leading technology and financial services firms in New York City. She started her career as a Consultant at Monitor Group, where she focused on research-informed growth strategies for start-ups, mergers, and companies in transition. Jody’s passion for social impact stems from her own background and her commitment to equity. She is a first-generation college graduate from rural Pennsylvania and knows firsthand the impact that circumstances and luck can have on life trajectories.