Profile

Georgia Levenson Keohane

Executive Director, Pershing Square Foundation

Georgia Levenson Keohane is the executive director of the Pershing Square Foundation, a New York-based family foundation that supports exceptional leaders and innovative organizations that tackle important social issues and deliver scalable and sustainable impact. From 2014-2016, Keohane directed New America’s Program on Profits and Purpose, a new initiative that explores ways in which social entrepreneurship, innovation and finance can address some of our most pressing social and economic challenges.

Keohane is also an adjunct Professor in the Social Enterprise Program at Columbia Business
School, and speaks and writes regularly on social and economic policy and the intersection of business and society. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, TIME, theHarvard Business Review, the Washington Monthly, Slate, The Nation, The American Prospect, and other publications. She is the author of Social Entrepreneurship for the 21st Century: Innovation Across the Nonprofit, Private and Public Sectors (McGraw Hill 2013) and Capital and the Common Good: How Innovative Finance is Tackling the World’s Most Urgent Problems (Columbia University, 2016).

Keohane’s career has bridged the private and nonprofit sectors. A former McKinsey consultant, she advises a number of organizations including philanthropies, community development and finance organizations, educational entities, think tanks and social purpose companies. From 2011-2014, Keohane was a Fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, where she worked on a range of issues in economic policy, including poverty and inequality, employment and job growth, social entrepreneurship and the role of firms in society. She has taught at Yale, and serves on the boards of several nonprofit organizations.

Keohane holds a B.A. from Yale University, an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, and an M.Sc. from London School of Economics, where she was a Fulbright Scholar. She lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters.

Authored Content

  • Jun 07 2016
    Blog Post The Innovative Finance Revolution: Private Capital for the Public Good Assessments of how governments and international organiza­tions have dealt with global challenges often feature a familiar refrain: when it comes to funding, there was too little, too late. The costs of economic, social, and environmental problems compound over time, whether it’s an Ebola outbreak that escalates to an epidemic, a flood of refugees that tests […] Georgia Levenson Keohane, Saadia Madsbjerg