Team

As a Managing Director of the Foundation, Nicole Gallant plays a lead role in sourcing new investments and working with the leadership of those organizations as an operating partner and board member as they grow to build capacity and to achieve their maximum impact. As a member of the Foundation’s senior leadership team, she also helps to execute the Foundation’s strategy and goals and contributes to its thought leadership and external outreach. Based in Europe and North America, Nicole will bring her decades of capacity-building skills to DRK portfolio organizations.

Nicole is an internationally recognized strategic leader with a track record of enabling and empowering local, national, and international social change organizations and their leaders. In addition to building the capacity of hundreds of community-based organizations and developing critical pathways for education for children and youth from historically disadvantaged communities, Nicole has developed program and initiative design, implementation, and performance management systems for clients such as UNICEF, USAID, American Institutes for Research, Academy for Conflict Transformation, and others and has co-led trauma-sensitive peacebuilding seminar for professional peace-builders from North America, the United Kingdom, sub-Saharan Africa, MENA, and Europe. Most recently, she has been supporting social change leaders and their organizations through process, program, and performance management strategies as a Founder and Principal at Downie Street.

Previously, Nicole served as the Senior Education Advisor and Director of Learn and Serve America in President Obama’s Administration, where she created the education strategy for the Serve America Act, leveraging education as a pathway to opportunity for historically disadvantaged communities. Prior to that, Nicole was a Programme Executive at the Atlantic Philanthropies, overseeing a nationwide Learning portfolio committed to increasing education equity for children and youth from low-income communities across the United States. As Senior Vice President at United Way of New York City, Nicole led program and policy initiatives supporting hundreds of community-based organizations to increase the self-sufficiency and resiliency of low-income New Yorkers.

Nicole holds an undergraduate and Master’s Degree in Public Policy and Administration from Columbia University.