Jeri Eckhart Queenan

Having served for more than 15 years as a partner in Bridgespan’s Boston and New York offices, Jeri Eckhart Queenan will now serve as a senior advisor, benefiting Bridgespan with her many years of leadership experience in the private, public, nonprofit, and faith sectors.

For more than ten years, Jeri spearheaded Bridgespan’s global practice, traveling to 50 countries on six continents, launching Bridgespan as the global organization it is today. Her work at Bridgespan includes precedent-setting projects with Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Women, an initiative that has achieved strong, measurable results by empowering more than 200,000 underserved women entrepreneurs in more than 60 countries, as well as the Ford Foundation’s two-billion dollar BUILD program. She has led high-impact engagements with The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiative, Salvation Army, Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, United Nations Foundation, Lever for Change, Catholic Charities DC, and Open Society Foundations.

Jeri led Bridgespan’s multiyear initiative to end the nonprofit starvation cycle, as she previously described in two popular articles, “Pay-What-It-Takes Philanthropy,” (Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2016) and “Stop Starving Scale: Unlocking the Potential of Global NGOs” (Bridgespan.org, April 2013). This work culminated in a momentous 2019 announcement by five major foundation presidents that they would improve their funding practice, sparking the “Fund for Real Change” movement that is advancing the quality of grantmaking worldwide.

Jeri has coauthored additional path-breaking articles on the role of faith in social impact, “Elevating the Role of Faith-Inspired Impact in the Social Sector”, scaling impact, “Designing for Transformative Scale: Global Lessons in What Works,” (Rotman School of Management Magazine, January 2015) and performance measurement, with “Measurement as Learning,” (Bridgespan.org, April 2011). She is a frequent public speaker have spoken at the InterAction Forum, Global Philanthropy Forum, Vatican Impact Investing Conference, MacDonald Conference for Leaders of Character at West Point, and the Harvard Global Development Conference.

Prior to Bridgespan, she served as a senior official in the executive branch of the United States’ government, first as a White House Fellow and then associate deputy secretary of labor, overseeing line agencies with a combined annual budget of $28 billion. She led several cabinet-level working groups on pension reform, steel industry restructuring, and child care policy during her tenure. Later, she served as chair and CEO of the White House Fellows Foundation in Washington, DC, president of the White House Fellows Alumni Association, and five-year member of the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships.

Jeri began her career in the corporate sector at the Boston Consulting Group, where she advised multinational corporations in healthcare and telecommunications and was promoted early to manager.

Jeri currently serves on the board of the Center for Action and Contemplation and has served on many boards over the last 25 years, including Catholic Relief Services, St. Vincent College, Leadership Roundtable, MicroEnsure, BOMA Fund, National Organization on Disability, Langley School, and Reliance Insurance.

Jeri graduated Phi Beta Kappa/summa cum laude from UCLA and received her MBA with honors from Harvard Business School. Jeri and her husband, Charlie, recently celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary. Their lives are blessed by their four adult children: Jenna, Charles, Max, and Michael.