Eric Adler

1998

Eric Adler

The Seed Foundation

http://www.seedfoundation.com

Washington D.C., United States

Education & Youth Leadership

The Bold Idea:

The SEED Foundation, Inc. is an organization devoted to bringing outstanding educational opportunities to under served inner city communities. The Foundation's first project is the SEED School of Washington, D.C., the nation's only public access college prep boarding school for inner city children. The SEED School of Maryland will open in September 2008. Rajiv and Eric have been involved in every facet of the planning and development of the SEED School, including designing the educational program, hiring key staff, raising more than $24 million in private donations, lobbying the federal and D.C. governments for $9 million in annual operating funding, floating more than $14 million in tax free bond financing, and developing the School's 19 acre campus to serve 300 students. Now in its tenth year of operation, the SEED School has already seen impressive academic and social gains in its students, and the School’s first four graduating classes have earned 97% rates of admission to colleges.

Biography:

Eric Adler is co-founder and managing director of The SEED Foundation. Eric taught high school physics for eight years and was dean of students at St. Paul's School in Baltimore, before earning an MBA in finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Eric has been a management consultant to Fortune 500 clients, the principal of an investment advisory firm and an adjunct faculty member of the Johns Hopkins University Graduate Division of Business and Management. He is a graduate of the Sidwell Friends School and of Swarthmore College, where he earned degrees in engineering and economics. Eric is an Echoing Green fellow and was named a Washingtonian of the Year by Washingtonian magazine. He is a 2001 recipient of the Manhattan Institute's Outstanding Social Entrepreneurship Award and received both an Oprah Winfrey "Use Your Life" Award and a Fast Company/Monitor Group's Social Capitalist Award.