Our Team

Jane Leu, Upwardly Global Founder

Jane has devoted her professional life to helping immigrants and refugees improve their career situations. Before founding Upwardly Global, she was the Assistant Director for Resettlement, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and the Assistant Director of RefugeeWorks, which provides technical assistance to refugee employment programs. She also helped launch seven refugee Welfare-to-Work programs. In 2000, she and Conrad Asper co-founded the craigslist nonprofit venture forum, a new approach for connecting the giving community to social change organizations.

Jane was the first Program Coordinator of the Nonprofit Program (now the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations) at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and a member of the Going-To-Scale Project that generated interest in venture philanthropy. She contributed research to publications on nonprofit organizational capacity, including "Virtuous Capital: What Foundations Can Learn from Venture Capitalists," Harvard Business Review, March 1997, and High Performance Nonprofit Organizations, Letts, Ryan and Grossman, Wiley and Sons, 1998.

Jane holds a master's degree from Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and a bachelor's degree from Tufts University. She is an Ashoka: Innovators for the Public Fellow, a Draper Richards Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship Fellow and a Rockefeller Foundation Next Generation Leadership Fellow. Jane is a frequent speaker on immigrant issues and social entrepreneurship.

Contact Jane at 415.834.9901