Elijah Goldberg 

Credit: Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

With a group of over 100 academics, I am founding a think tank focused on reducing poverty by spurring growth through the regional integration of East Africa. Learn more: https://eastafrica.institute/concept

I am also getting my masters in public affairs at Princeton School of International and Public Affairs, concentrating in international development.

Before coming to Princeton, I was chief of staff for the chief economist of USAID, helping him launch a new Independent Office within USAID that has a mandate to increase the use of cost-effectiveness evidence in activity design and establish a macroeconomic policy program for the Agency. 

Before USAID, I co-founded and led ImpactMatters, a nonprofit rating agency that produced the largest public collection of nonprofit impact estimates in history — by an order of magnitude. After we brokered an acquisition with Charity Navigator, the country’s largest charity rater, our work became Charity Navigator’s Impact & Results Rating.

After launching the new Charity Navigator rating, I joined a fintech startup, Spiral Financial, that raised $42 million to build a socially responsible banking service. As head of giving, I designed better giving experiences for clients and led the creation of a new banking product for nonprofits.

I previously co-founded Walimu, an Ugandan NGO that creates and scales science that saves lives, in high school and led it in college as the founding executive director. Today, Walimu’s 170 staff are 100% Ugandan nationals, a reflection of the community’s commitment to the human right to self-determination. They run implementation research studies funded by groups like NIH and Gates Foundation to discover solutions to health challenges such as tuberculosis, sepsis and child survival. They also run national programs, such as the Uganda Clubfoot Program and have special expertise in Ebola outbreak response and infection prevention and control. 

I am manic-depressive, which motivates a passion for universal access to quality mental healthcare.

I am a humanitarian- I don’t mean that as a description of how I show up day to day, but as a label for the core belief that drives me: Every human has rights — and to that end, we should try our best to take up our work again tomorrow, if we can, until the day each right is realized for each soul.

Get in touch: goldberg.elijah@gmail.com


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