With experiences across four continents, Yordanos Eyoel is an Ethiopian-American democracy entrepreneur who is the founder and CEO of Keseb.
Keseb is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization building an ecosystem for cross-country learning, collaboration, and innovation to advance inclusive democracies. For launching Keseb in 2022, Eyoel received the “Extraordinary Leader Transforming a Field” award by Unorthodox Philanthropy.
Previously, Eyoel was a managing partner at New Profit, where she was the first person in the organization’s 22-year history to grow from portfolio analyst to managing partner. As managing partner, she expanded New Profit’s early-stage portfolio by 3x in four years, supporting ~100 early-stage organizations, 80 percent led by people of color. In 2019, Eyoel founded New Profit’s Civic Lab, the first nonpartisan venture philanthropy initiative in the U.S. to invest in innovative solutions building civic trust and a strong civic culture in America.
Eyoel is a Civil Society Fellow of the ADL & the Aspen Institute and a former visiting fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. In 2017, Yordanos co-founded and served as the international spokesperson of the Sister March Network that mobilized over 4 million people for the 2017 Women’s March. Eyoel serves as the board chair of PushBlack, the largest nonprofit media organization for Black Americans. Eyoel’s work and writing has been featured in Fast Company, Stanford Social Innovation Review, WBUR/NPR, and We the Possibility by Harvard Business Review, among others. In 2019, Eyoel delivered the TEDx talk “Why Voting isn’t Enough” to inspire expansive and on-going civic engagement.
Eyoel holds a BA in economics and political science, honors, Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Florida, where she was inducted into the University Hall of Fame. She also holds a master’s in public policy from Harvard Kennedy School. Eyoel is the 2020 recipient of the City of Boston Spark Impact Award for Activism and Issue Advocacy.