Zach Slobig

Zach Slobig is an editorial director in Bridgespan's San Francisco office. He is coauthor of the recent publications, "Learning from Nonprofits and NGOs That Have Put Large, Flexible Grants to Work", "Want to Fund in the Global South? Philanthropic Collaboratives Can Help", "Closing the Racial Wealth Gap: Philanthropy's Role in Driving Shared Prosperity", "Policy Incrementalism and How Philanthropy’s Support Can Turn Small Sustained Steps into Big Impact", and "Using All the Tools in the Toolkit: Funding Advocacy for Social Change" (Bridgespan.org, 2024). Prior to joining Bridgespan, he was the writer and editor at the Skoll Foundation and worked across its many initiatives. Previously, he worked on the staffs of Agence-France Presse, WIRED, National Public Radio, and GOOD. Before his career in journalism, he served both with City Year and the Los Angeles Conservation Corps. He is a product of California’s public higher education system: Masters of Journalism from UC Berkeley; BA in Ethnographic Sociology, Summa Cum Laude from UCLA, and he got his start at mighty little Santa Monica College.

Zach is drawn to stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things. He has written documentary news features and story-edited award-winning independent documentaries that have screened internationally. In 2009 he co-wrote 180˚ South, a feature film about land conservation wrapped in a pan-American adventure story that began in California and ended in Chilean Patagonia. Shortly after, he and his wife traced a similar path down the entire Pacific coastline in a pickup truck loaded with camping gear and surfboards. They now live with their eleven-year-old daughter in the westernmost sandy fringes of San Francisco.