Vanessa Kirsch is an American social entrepreneur who is the founder and co-CEO of New Profit, a venture philanthropy fund based in Boston, Massachusetts.
[7] However, her tenacity and drive, which she described in a letter to the admissions office, was enough to gain her admittance to the University, where she served as a Tufts Community Union Senator and student member of the Board of Trustees.
[7] Through this experience, she came to understand that the nonprofit sector lacked sufficient access to second-stage growth capital, locking social entrepreneurs and their funders into a start-up phase mentality.
She determined that in order for social entrepreneurs to have the greatest possible impact, they needed access to financial capital that could allow them to sustain and grow successful, tested program models.
After over a year of research and development with a team of social entrepreneurs, academics, and philanthropists, Kirsch and a partner founded New Profit in 1998.