Nancy Roob

Nancy Roob is the CEO of Blue Meridian Partners and the President and CEO of The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation.

Roob played a major role in developing and implementing EMCF’s grantmaking strategy of making large, long-term investments in building the organizational capacity and evidence base of nonprofits whose programs have the potential to lift the life prospects of greater numbers of America’s most disadvantaged youth.

She also pioneered a form of coordinated, collaborative investment, called growth capital aggregation, which in eight years leveraged $155 million of EMCF’s own funds to help 16 grantees secure nearly $487 million in additional private and public funding. The launch in 2016 of Blue Meridian Partners opened a new chapter in the evolution of this investment approach. (Nancy Roob and Chairman Stan Druckenmiller discussed Blue Meridian Partners in the Nonprofit Quarterly.) In 2017, Roob spoke to TedX about her hope that Blue Meridian’s performance-based investments of up to $200 million will revolutionize giving and create “a new normal” for philanthropy. In 2021, Forbes included Roob in its list of 50 women over the age of 50 who are forging a more innovative and inclusive financial future.

Before becoming president in 2005, Roob was the Foundation’s vice president and chief operating officer. Prior to that, she developed EMCF’s Program for New York Neighborhoods, which launched community-building and neighborhood-stabilization projects in the South Bronx and Central Harlem. One of the projects this program supported evolved into the Harlem Children’s Zone, whose success has inspired legislation to create “Promise Neighborhoods” throughout the nation.

Before she joined the Foundation, Roob worked for the Boston Persistent Poverty Project, a program of the Rockefeller and Boston foundations; the Fund for the Homeless, a project of the Boston Foundation; and the Child Care Resource and Referral Center, also in Boston.

Roob is a graduate and trustee of Hamilton College and holds a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.