SPARK 2024

Meredith Blake is a producer, attorney, and social entrepreneur with more than 25 years of experience in creating social change. Under her banner, Storied Nation, she serves as a producer and executive producer on films and television shows that hold promise for moving the needle on critical social issues. Prior to that, Meredith was the CEO of ProSocial, the social impact agency she founded in 2007, helping clients like Amazon Studios, Sony Pictures Entertainment, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation create deep impact philanthropic initiatives and social impact campaigns grounded in research with an eye toward sustainability.

Prior to launching ProSocial, Meredith worked as executive vice president at Participant Media, where she built the studio’s social action department. One of the highlights was creating the social action campaign that accompanied the release of Vice President Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth.” She started her career by founding Break the Cycle, a widely recognized nonprofit organization to empower youth to end domestic violence, which she ran for more than 10 years.

Meredith has an extensive track record in raising production funding, finishing funds, and impact funds for filmmakers as well as providing critical strategic guidance and forging valuable partnerships for some of the most important films and shows of our times. Each year she chooses several films to contribute to as a producer, executive producer, or impact producer. As a public speaker, Meredith has served as keynote, panelist, and moderator at numerous conferences and events such as the Sundance Producer’s Lab, Media that Matters, Illuminate Film Festival and the Producer’s Guild of America. She has also served on the boards of Healthy Child, Healthy World and PS1 Pluralistic School and as an advisor to a number of nonprofit organizations going for second-stage funding and national scale. She is a member of Pleiades Network, an organization that inspires, recognizes, and advances women’s leadership in creating a more sustainable world.

As an award-winning Hollywood director, Stephen Gyllenhaal loves tackling challenging subjects through his movies, TV shows, and documentaries, including “Twin Peaks,” “Rectify,” “Dangerous Woman,” “Losing Isaiah,” “Paris Trout,” “Girl Fight,” “Waterland,” “Killing In a Small Town,” “Leap of Faith,” “Shattered Mind,” and “In Utero.”

He has published a book of poetry, Claptrap, Notes from Hollywood; is writing two new books, Enjoy it! and Liquid Motel and is a proud father and grandfather.

At the beginning of 2017 he embarked on two charitable projects – this movie and an educational Institute, focusing on the impact of trauma from conception through pre-verbal development. From the perspective of these two latest ventures, he’s come to understand and experience the profound dysfunction of the so-called “non-profit sector” and has made it his mission to do everything he can to unleash the charitable/mission driven sector to do what it was charged to do – make this a far better world. “Uncharitable” is step one.

Dan Pallotta is an activist, humanitarian, author, and builder of movements. He is a pioneer in the national effort to transform the way our culture evaluates the character and impact of nonprofit organizations. His iconic TED Talk on philanthropy has been viewed more than five million times. It is the 16th most-commented TED talks of all time. It has been translated into 27 languages and continues to be viewed over 1,000 times a day by people all over the world. His 2016 TED talk on being has been viewed more than 2 million times. He is one of the 100 most-viewed TED speakers of all time.

He is a founding thought partner for TED’s Audacious Project, which has raised nearly $1 billion for disruptive entrepreneurial social initiatives across a variety of issues.

He invented the multi-day charitable event industry. He created the breast cancer 3-Day Walks and the multiday AIDS rides long-distance cycling journeys, which raised in excess of half a billion dollars in nine years and were the subject of a Harvard Business School case study. The model and methods he created are now employed by dozens of charities and have raised in excess of $1.5 billion more for important causes from pediatric leukemia to AIDS to suicide prevention and many others.

He is the author of Uncharitable: How Restraints on Nonprofits Undermine Their Potential, the bestselling title in the history of Tufts University Press. The Stanford Social Innovation Review said that the book, “deserves to become the nonprofit sector ’s new manifesto.” His newest book is, The Everyday Philanthropist: A Better Way to Make a Better World, a field guide for the average person who wants their life to matter.

Dan is the founder and president of the Charity Defense Council, which is dedicated to transforming the way the public evaluates charities. He is the founder and President of Add Humanity, a message and movement-building consultancy that helps super innovative humanitarian organizations dream and grow.

Dan is a William J. Clinton Distinguished Lecturer, and has spoken at Stanford, Wharton, Harvard Business School, Harvard’s Hauser Center for Nonprofits, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Brown, the United Nations, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Council on Foundations, and the Gates Foundation, among others.

Dan been written about in feature and cover stories in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and has appeared on The Today Show, the BBC, CNN, CNBC, American Public Media’s Marketplace, and numerous NPR stations, among others.

Jacob Harold is a social sector executive, advisor, and author. He’s traveled from farm to monastery to jail to laboratory to boardroom, all in search of the best ways to do good. From 2012 to 2021, Harold served as president & CEO of GuideStar and co-founder of Candid. Fast Company called Candid “the definitive nonprofit transparency organization.” Each year, more than 20 million people use its data on nonprofits, grants, and social sector practice.

Candid was formed in 2019 by the merger of GuideStar and Foundation Center. Harold co-led the $45 million capital campaign to launch Candid, wrote Candid’s guiding strategy document, Candid 2030, and served as executive vice president during post-merger integration. During his tenure leading GuideStar, Harold oversaw a financial turnaround, a tripling of GuideStar’s reach, and major partnerships with organizations ranging from Google to the Gates Foundation. In 2013, Harold launched the Overhead Myth campaign to shift attention from nonprofits’ financial ratios to their programmatic results. Since then, GuideStar’s Profile Program has been used by more than 200,000 nonprofits to tell their full story to the world.

Harold joined GuideStar from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, where he led a $30 million grantmaking initiative to build a 21st-century infrastructure for smart giving. Before that, he worked as a consultant to nonprofits and foundations at Bridgespan and as a climate change campaigner and strategist with the Packard Foundation, Rainforest Action Network, and Greenpeace USA. He began his career as a grassroots organizer with Green Corps.

Harold earned a bachelor’s summa cum laude in ethics and intellectual history from Duke University and a master’s in business administration from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He was a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations and has further training from MIT, Bain, the Chinese Academy of Sciences/Santa Fe Institute, and the SIT Tibetan Studies Program, where he did the first translations of newly discovered poems by the Sixth Dalai Lama.