Jim Pitofsky

1993

Jim Pitofsky

Education & Youth Leadership

The Bold Idea:

After getting a public interest law degree from Georgetown, Jim founded and directed IDEALS, an organization that worked internationally to create school/community and business/education partnerships. IDEALS was later adopted by the National Association for Partners in Education, and recognized by then-U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley as a national model for service-learning partnerships. IDEALS also became one of the lead training and technical assistance organizations under the U.S. federal government and Jim led trainings for every state in the U.S. and for numerous other countries. In addition, during that time, Jim also led national policy efforts to advance service-learning through the National and Community Service Coalition. As its elected president, he provided counsel to the Clinton Administration and to Congress in shaping federal legislation. The Coalition, representing thousands of programs and millions of volunteers, served as the leading collective voice for the service movement. He also was an informal advisor to President Clinton’s Initiative on Race.

Biography:

Jim Pitofsky serves as the Director of Education at the Arizona Community Foundation, a 30-year-old, $400+ million, statewide charitable foundation. Jim leads the Foundation's education grantmaking, the advising of high net-worth donors on their education grantmaking, and the convening of cross-sectoral leaders for education reform.  Jim was actively engaged with committees of Governor Napolitano’s P-20 Council, and then provided input and policy recommendations to Governor Brewer’s Education Transition team.

Just prior, Jim was the Executive Director of Hands on Bay Area and was responsible for managing and growing its base of volunteers who create and complete more than 120 community service projects each month, supporting more than 300 Bay Area nonprofit organizations. Hands On is also the leading manager of corporate volunteerism in the Bay Area, for companies such as Cisco, Google, Gap, Levi’s, Schwab, etc. Jim also served on the Advisory Board for Governor Schwarzenegger's Office on Volunteerism.

Jim also had been the Deputy Director of the National Youth Leadership Council, one of the leading service-learning organizations in the U.S. and the world. He oversaw NYLC's strategic planning, strategic alliances, annual conference, training and technical assistance and played a leadership role with international efforts. In this capacity, he went to South Africa with Ambassador Richard Holbrooke and corporate executive members of the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS and led a collaborative of NGO leaders from North, Central and South America to improve service-learning practices.

Following his service-learning work, Jim served as the VP and then acting President of the Echoing Green Foundation, where he initiated and managed strategic entrepreneurial alliances with businesses, philanthropists, foundations, government agencies and Fellows. He provided and coordinated training and technical support to 300 social entrepreneurs in 30 states and 30 nations. While at Echoing Green and after, Jim served on the Board of Grantmakers for Effective Organizations, the fastest growing affinity group in the Council on Foundations. After Echoing Green, Jim founded and served as the CEO of Sea Change until its merger that formed the Social Enterprise Alliance, where he served as a Partner. For those 5 years, Jim worked to build stronger, more effective nonprofits by mobilizing a community of practitioners and investors to advance earned income strategies. Through his various positions, Jim has advised and/or partnered with corporate CEO's, senior staff at companies and directors of corporate foundations and trained hundreds of corporate directors on how to improve their giving and corporate volunteerism and how to use service as a strategy for employee leadership development. He also helped the founders of the Full Circle Fund, a philanthropic giving circle, to think through how to shape FCF more than 5 years ago. And, he has spoken at the World Economic Forum (Davos), FORTUNE CEO Forum, White House Conference on Philanthropy, national conferences of the Points of Light Foundation, Hands on Network, Business for Social Responsibility and Social Venture Network, and hundreds of other convenings of corporate, philanthropic and nonprofit leaders.

In addition, in the Entertainment industry, he co-organized a venture fair at Investing in Media That Matters, a significant gathering of leaders from the entertainment, philanthropic and investment communities, which Robert Redford opened at the beginning of the Sundance Film Festival.

Prior to the above, Jim worked toward social change through the law (disability, civil rights, education and the death penalty) through the ACLU, Skadden Arps, the NY Lawyers for Public Interest, and Advocates for Children and he has been actively involved in community organizing and public policy issues concerning people with disabilities, communities of color, low-income communities and migrant farm workers.